Sometimes, you chase the moment and you can never catch it. Films take so long to make that you can never anticipate what the cultural landscape will be when the film enters the world.

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.

As a generation, Generation X or whatever we were called, we were not being nurtured. We didn't have Obama. We didn't have Bill Clinton. We didn't have any politicians that you could look up to, nor did we have parents.

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.

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

I've never had access to another person's art and work or, particularly, someone who is as prolific and was able to externalize his interior world as deeply as Kurt [Cobain] could.

I have three children, and they have never spent a minute unsupervised in their lives. My generation overcompensated like mad. I'm not even joking, every kid on my street [growing up] was molested. My kids would not have had an opportunity to molested, because they've never been alone, which is going to create a whole set of problems.