You are traveling and see these people shooting the entire experience of going through a city, and maybe in the back of their minds they sustain the illusion that they will edit it all, but I don't think that's it.

I’m Armenian, and April 24th was another commemoration of the genocide of Armenia people by Turkey. The perpetrator never admitted the crime. I was raised with that, this question: how do you actually find the truth of such a traumatic event? I'm obsessed with that issue.

That's a very odd notion because it involves seeing money up there on the screen - if something cost $5 million to make, they want to see that $5 million up there.

One of the huge advantages of shooting in the winter is that locations that wouldn't have been available to us suddenly were, like Yorkville. ... It's just specific streets and specific angles. I think that's what's always kind of shocking about some cities: they are really about intersections.

I think in the '80s, when I started making films, we were all suspicious of these technologies. We were all convinced they would filter out any emotion and sense of intimacy, and the films I made during that period reflected that. In fact, what has happened is the opposite. I think we're saturated with a degree of intimacy we would never have expected, and we're trying to sort through this idea of complete access to each other's lives on an ongoing basis. Our emotions aren't filtered out at all. They're actually accelerated.

My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration.

I love when people are resilient and when they form ways of dealing with grief or dealing with some traumatic episode, and sometimes those are the wrong choices.