I have to try to watch myself and give myself feedback. People would take for granted that I was ready to go right away. And I would say, "No, no, no, no, I actually have to go talk to myself." Because I need to just take a minute to think about what just happened and tell myself what to do in the next take, so just give me two minutes to go be a director.

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 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 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 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.

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

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.