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 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.

I started making movies in my late 20s, that time in an artist's career that often sees artists just imitating things that he or she loves. I just wanted to be great like L'Age d'Or vintage Buñuel. I wanted to be Busby Berkeley, for crying out loud! I wanted to have chorus girls stomping their heels in my casting office. I wanted to be Erich Von Stroheim monogramming underwear for extras. So I started off my career doing that, and that was fun, but I realised I wasn't very good at it.

I've usually never felt comfortable shooting until things were kind of claustrophobic, but ballet dancers need a lot of space, so the sets that I designed had to be big. Normally, I'd design a kitchen that was half the size of a normal kitchen, just to make everything feel kind of womb-like, but the kitchen in a ballet would have to be like 100 feet wide and just as long.

If I want to keep making films for a few more years, I probably should be willing to adapt. I've sort of evolved into the filmmaker that I am because of natural selection anyway.

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

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.