At the end of Requiem all I wanted to do was get a DV camera and just do a small film. But then the hunger comes back.

I've always wanted to introduce hip-hop filmmaking to film. There's hip-hop art, dance, music, but there really isn't hip-hop film. So I was trying to do that.

I remember the few times that happened to me in writing, where you basically start writing and you look at the clock and six hours have gone by and you're, like, "Whoa! What the hell just happened?" And that piece ends up in the final product even though the final product is three years away. It doesn't get rewritten. It came out the right way. But that's happened to me so few times in my life.

I think it's important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you've got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances.

I think people are people and, if their feelings are truthful, they can connect. It doesn't matter if you're an aging, 50-something wrestler at the end of his career, or an ambitious, 20-something ballet dancer.

I've spent a life loving women and studying them as much as I can, or am allowed to.

The whole visual language of the movie is developed way before we get to set. Especially when you're doing visual effects and you don't have a lot of money to mess around, which we didn't, you have to really preplan everything. Pretty much every shot in the film was figured out months before we got to set.