The only purpose of the visuals, in any film, is to serve the story.

So much of the writing is not conscious, in the sense that it's not calculated. I remember in film school we had so many studies with big fancy words where you could dissect a movie and make charts of all of the characters' complicated inner relations and themes and what does this mean? And it's overwhelming as a student. It's great for a student, but as a writer, it's paralyzing.

When you get questions that annoy you the art is answering them differently. If you're bored with it, then everyone will be bored with it.

I've got the luxury of being able to work largely alone, so I don't need to communicate difficult creative classeas to other people and can leave the whole thing in my head or on scattered notes and sketches that only I need to understand. So I can very radically and quickly change things as I go without tripping anybody else up. And the camera allows me to experiment and try new things on the fly.

I'd love to start some movements. What I'm tired of is irony, and sarcasm, and music/movies/what have you, not having the guts to mean anything.

If you go to a film festival and watch a bunch of features and then watch a bunch of shorts, you will almost always find that the shorts are where people are taking more risks and pushing more boundaries...simply because they have much less to lose.

It's naturally kind of humiliating and strange to have a microphone; when you're young you just make movies, you don't worry about all the peripheral stuff that comes with it.