Digital information, for every type of storage, is unfounded. If everything is on a hard drive and the hard drive freezes up, your whole photography collection could just go away. We can still look at printed photographs of our grandparents. We can physically hold them in our hands and look at it.

If you don't have the story and the unfolding of the trajectory of the saga, it's like getting in a car and not having any gas.

I had wanted to do a comedy.

Yeah, Kubrick's a big influence. In something like 'A Clockwork Orange,' he is trying to use the practical light - I mean, at least he says that in his interviews, like they're not using traditionally Hollywood lights. In 'Elephant' we basically used no lights; we never really adjusted.

There is a common theme, though, in the stories I have told, which are usually associations of characters or families that are formed outside of a family circle.

Now the music industry is sort of like a Craigslist venture, right? Where you're making your own records and selling them online.

My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the 'Village Voice' and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.