At age 12 I had an obsession with Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and then proceeded to watch all the other Kubrick films I could including a doc called Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures in which it was revealed to me that he started as a photographer...I got a camera sometime shortly after, but spent many years just photographing flowers in my neighborhood.

I'm not passive aggressive. If something bothers me, I think about it, then I act on it. I express it.

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.

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.

I need what I'm thinking to come out into the world, even if it's a two-word approval, like, "Yeah, I agree," I need that approval so that in the morning I can get up and use that when I go to work. It's a weird version of focusing.

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.

I've been really interested in focusing on the aspects of my Russian heritage I'm proud of. I'm actually em­barrassed to tell people I'm Russian, because it's become such an awful place.