Be true to yourself. Don't take no for an answer. And start your Transcendental Meditation.

Directors who have inspired me include Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini, lngmar Bergman, John Ford, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Ernst Lubitsch. In art school, I studied painters like Edward Hopper, who used urban motifs, Franz Kafka is my favorite novelist. My approach to film stems from my art background, as I go beyond the story to the sub-conscious mood created by sound and images.

Achievement is its own reward

With each experience of the unbounded ocean of consciousness, you infuse it into your life and therefore expand whatever consciousness you had to begin with.

You need contrast and conflict in order to tell a story. Stories need to have dark and light, turmoil, all those things. But that does not mean the filmmaker has to suffer in order to show the suffering. Stories should have the suffering, not the people.

Stories hold conflict and contrast, highs and lows, life and death, and the human struggle and all kinds of things.

The technology can change, but storytelling remains the same. It's just a digital world now instead of an analog world, but now the storytelling's the same. You got different tools. That's all.