Keep doing what you're doing no matter what anyone says. Defy your own doubt.

I knew that I wanted to live in a city, but had never really been to New York. But I was begging my parents as a kid to move to New York, so it was just something that I sort of knew from a young age.

I watch everything from independent art-house cinema to foreign film. I don't watch as many Hollywood blockbusters but once in a while, I'm curious. I like to see what's out there.

Some of my favorite all-time movies - Wong Kar-wai is just amazing. In the Mood for Love is probably my favorite film ever. Those lyrical montages are so stunning.

I was really inspired by my own experience, and specifically my own identity crisis but larger than that, I also wanted to explore the trend of reverse immigration, of the immigrant returning home after being in a host country or an adopted home for 20 years, and finding themselves at various levels of discord with the home culture. I wanted to explore people building lives across multiple geographies. I think that's, something that we're experiencing more and more as travel becomes easier, as people are traveling more for work. People can work from anywhere.

I discovered myself in the back-and-forth and in the hyphenated Arab-American way, and one of the things that I discovered was that I really didn't fit in anywhere. So in the US, I was considered an Arab - because I grew up in small-town Ohio - and in the Middle East, I was considered the American.

I think that you have to have a really specific type of personality to be able to both direct and act, because it requires enormous shifts in perspective. I mean, when you're directing, you're looking at the world through a wide-angle lens, and you're seeing all of it. You know exactly what's happening in every corner of it. You know what people are going to say. You know what they're going to do. You're controlling everything.