Classical scores go up and down; they're kind of hysterical in a way. And movie scores are much more - they just drive and move forward, and they build and can't go up and down at that same speed. It's a big job to turn that into something that pushes the movie along.

Every film had its own grammar. And it's your job as a director to basically figure out a language to tell a story.

Also expressionistic filmmaking - making the audience feel like they were inside the characters' heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.

I was a TV junkie as a kid. I am the Sesame Street generation.

I don't think I make genre films. I think studios try to sell films as genres because they know how to do that. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't know what I make. It's sort of a pot roast, all my films.

I was always writing about the connection between man and nature. I grew up in a neighborhood that was right on the beach, but the beach was not like a beach you would imagine - there was a lot of pollution. And the most magical thing to me as a kid was sea glass, so I wrote about that a lot.

I couldn't sleep one night and I was sitting in my office and I realized that I was an independent filmmaker.