It's why I fell in love with movies. You can sit in a movie theater and be transported to a place that you never get to go and be a person who you never in your life would get to be and feel something and have empathy for people and see things from another point of view.

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.

From as early as I can remember, I wanted to have something to do with the acting business. I was a TV junkie as a kid and I think, because I grew up in a small town where I couldn't imagine myself staying there and couldn't see myself being any of the people that I was surrounded by in this town, I just knew that I wanted a different kind of a life, but I didn't know what that meant and I didn't know how.

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.

I definitely did not play myself. As the writer of the script, I have traits of all the characters. I can relate to all of the characters.

When you step in to act, you just zoom way in on the longest possible lens and you're just totally in the point of view of your character and you have to forget about everyone else. You don't care about what anybody else is, what they want or what they're trying to do. You're just concerned with your circumstances, what you're trying to get out of someone or some scene.

I grew up watching a lot of Egyptian movies. My parents had this huge VHS collection of every Egyptian movie you can possibly imagine, and Egypt was kind of the Hollywood of the Middle East back in the '40s, '50s, and '60s. That was my first education in film.