On the American side, some of the movies that I watched when I was a kid, like E.T. or The Wizard of Oz, those are films that changed my point of view of what film could be, of what you could do. Those are the ones that I remember were incredible when I was younger.

I'm always looking for ways to explore the politics of the everyday. For me, the proverbs were a way of bringing in this ancient wisdom that in Arabic culture is often quoted. Those proverbs are such a huge part of the language and parts of people's every day. This is the wisdom that we use in our everyday life but we're not always listening to.

On the American side, some of the movies that I watched when I was a kid, like E.T. or The Wizard of Oz, those are films that changed my point of view of what film could be, of what you could do. Those are the ones that I remember were incredible when I was younger.

When it comes to identity, that was an issue that plagued me for a lot of my life. It's something that I wanted to tap into. Film can really take you to other places, and sometimes that's necessary to understand your own identity or someone else's identity or just the issue of identity, in general. It takes you. It's borderless. It's boundless. It's universal.

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.

When there's an actor involved, the actor's talking to the director or the director's talking to the actor. But when there are not those two people interacting, it's all one person in your own mind, you have to be so extra-clear about what you need.

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.