I am more at peace than I've ever known myself to be. My connectedness to the world is more intense. I am more attentive to the humanity around me.

I don't think you can strategize to be poetic and neither can you strategize to be funny. It is not a tool, it is itself - it comes from the moment, from the character, from the background, from the streets.

A lot of narrative films leave you no space for anything else but eating popcorn. I want to go in the complete opposite direction. I have to evacuate all psychology, to be less a protagonist and more a presence.

Silence can be intimidating, sometimes provocative, sometimes a form of resistance because it dislocates.

It's crucial to choose your work place - some places lend themselves to you and others don't.

What cinema can do is the reordering of this reality from a certain chaos or from a certain order into an aesthetic dimension.

Someone like myself is not from one place. I am in total identification with the New York, French, and Palestine experience and do not stop at the borders of identity.