I love melodrama. I love the simple fact. When you read Euripides he's a page turner. It's like reading a Mexican comic book romance.

Making the ballet really taught me how to get things moving. Ballet dancers don't stand still.

I've long believed that anybody who is in the act of remembering childhood is a poet, because you're thinking back on times when you were making false models of the universe. Everything is kind of irrational and poetic then.

You get to have some mischief before you're basically a blackened banana, impotent, and nothing to be afraid of.

When I started making films I just decided "I'm the filmmaking equivalent of a garage band and I'll just make my garage band movies." But even the same musicians from garage bands would go to my movies and you could tell what they liked from the way that they dressed and they would be the first ones to walk out.

If I hope to survive, I have to acknowledge the natural selection that goes on when film stocks and cameras are eliminated from the world. And film viewers won't want to watch the same thing over and over again from me.

I just discovered that there were so many lost movies that were all mine to take if I wanted to take them. I was drunk on greed when I encountered this motherlode of utterly fascinating narratives that time's great river washed up on its banks for me to just scavenge, and not even rub clean, just repurpose and take credit for. It was kind of one of those weird dreams that where you keep finding free money.