You can't divorce yourself from your own life experiences.

The only people who really love the '80s are millennials. We had Reagan and Bush for our entire youth, the culture was terrible, the fashions were terrible, the movies were terrible.

I never met Kurt Cobain, but I felt like I got to know him in a manner probably more intimate than anyone I've known outside of my family.

I try and make non-fiction films that feel like fiction, so I'm always looking for the subtext and that's what really excites me.

One thing about Kurt [Cobain] is before he was a musician, and before he was a rock star, he was an artist, and an artist with a capital A. What that means is that he had to create. It wasn't something that he chose to do - it chose him.

When I grew up, we had no babysitters and nobody every observed us. People don't parent like that today. They're very hands-on; kids are constantly being supervised.

Oftentimes when people make movies about the '80s, they go back and look at '80s films, [but] those look nothing like the '80s. It's some watered-down version of reality.