I was really fixated when I was a child. Again my mother was just talking to me about this, about how I would how try to get details exactly right. I guess I was always very persistent.

I was never conscious of filming except for when I was location scouting. In a way, that is the most important part of the entire process - and the most private. I'm so used to doing that alone. Unlike every other part, it's just me, alone, on location.It's very hard to describe what I'm looking for - something that feels both familiar and strange at the same time. It's not enough for it just to be strange or mysterious, it also has to feel very ordinary, very familiar, and very nondescript.

You have this ambition to make something perfect, exactly right. Of course, necessarily, it fails in some way and you have to accept that for what it is, and then you're on to the next thing.

All my pictures are very voyeuristic, but ultimately I'm looking at what lurks in my own interior. I make photographs because I want to answer the question of what propels me to do the things that I do. But that always remains a mystery.

The suburban landscape is alien and strange and exotic. I photograph it out of longing and desire. My photographs are also about repression and internal angst.

I'm very moved by the fact that people are drawn into the pictures and that they do bring their own history and their own interpretation to the photograph. I think that's why they work in a certain way.

I'm not that particularly talented in terms of making anything or - I'm not technically efficient. I certainly don't know how to draw very well or paint, and I'm not good with computers. But I think the thing that I'm good at is willing something into life, no matter what. I do what it takes to get it done.