I was completely broke, so I started saying yes to everything. I said yes to a woman who approached me about shooting the Dracula ballet, even though I felt like I was probably going to sabotage it.

I define melodrama as truth uninhibited. It's the kind of truth we dream about. Rather than melodrama being exaggerated, it's actually uninhibited. And it's a big difference - people look down on exaggerations, but I think they should look up to the un-inhibitions.

I guess what inspires me most is the desire to draw out feelings that feel best expressed on the written page by really good authors, and I'm not a really good author. I feel like my job as a filmmaker is to eff the ineffable, to take feelings that only poets could describe with words and try to project them on the screen for viewers to feel. I don't think I've succeeded once but in the act of trying I've come up with all these other results which sometimes intrigue me.

But in the act of attempting to imitate I discovered that I had a voice of my own. Whether I liked it or not was another matter. I found that I was my best or that I pleased myself most or came closest to my goals when I was tapped into something autobiographical.

I've never made movies to reach millions of people.

I like the way we get to be uninhibited in our dreams, we don't' need to repress our behaviours like we do in our daily lives. If we lust after someone in a dream we get to possess him or her, if we dislike someone we get to express it or even strike out at them. Something I wouldn't think of doing, I don't have the courage, and it's not right either.

If I feel like crying, I'll just cry in a dream. Something I really try not to do in my waking hours. I like good melodrama because it's just an undumping of all these compulsions we feel that we work so hard to master during our waking hours. No wonder we crash to sleep in bed at night. We have to, otherwise we'd just spend our waking hours shredding the feelings from everybody else.