I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

Appearing on the front page of the New York Times even given the state of papers today is still something that's seen by a lot of people.

Maybe [killers] is one of my real passions. Why deny it?

A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference between the two, about where documentary ends and drama begins.

I actually felt diminished by watching [Donald Trump's]. If this is what discourse has become in America, who even wants to know about it? It's just too demoralizing and unsettling.

A movie is like a tip of an iceberg, in a way, because so little of what you do in connection with making a movie actually gets into the movie. Almost everything gets left behind.

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.