There's only a handful of people I trust completely, and I know who they are. Other than that, I pretty much don't trust people.

Russia itself is an extremely complex country, and sometimes I feel like all of that comes back to haunt me. I can see why so many Russian writers were so tortured.

Teenagers are like atoms when they're moving at hundreds of miles an hour and bouncing off each other. Everybody's got such a crazy hormonal drive and reacting to each other differently and getting upset over little things. High school puts all these potential explosions in one place.

I usually bring a point and shoot with me so I can go out on the weekends and shoot a bit. I used to bring more cameras, but I'm also an Ebay nut so sometimes I'll order something if I'm really pining for it when I'm on location.

Communism destroyed so many generations. I look at my grandparents and their generation, and it's as if their lives were taken from them. It's really sad and frightening that something like that could have happened. But I don't really think of myself as Russian anymore. I didn't even live there for that long.

If you want to make movies you need to think on a micro-micro level and figure out how to make them for nothing with people who really care about your movie and really want to make it.

And also, that's the kind of wonderful thing about film culture, is the interaction between films and who works on what, where they were before, and now what they're doing now, and that inevitably informs how people view a film.