The fact that you couldn't see Alfred Hitchcock's first film The Mountain Eagle, or that you couldn't see so many of F.W. Murnau's masterpieces, or that you couldn't see so many of Oscar Micheaux's really intriguing race melodramas, made with fierce independent spirit against all odds in '20s and '30s America. That stuff haunted me. They really did bring to life a sense of 20th Century history: cultural history, pop history, gender politics and race politics, socio economic history, all that stuff. It was bracing and instructive.

You also convert real memories, whatever that means, into film versions of those memories. Because by the time you've finished the project you can't remember the real memories anymore, you just remember the film versions of them. And then if the film failed you have distaste for them. So I don't think about that stuff anymore.

The spirit of my films... I always want them to be kind of contrarian. Meticulous on the one hand, but unbelievably sloppy and careless on the other. I guess that's what you get anyway, if you're not planning very much.

Silent films are fairytales. All stories are more or less fairytales, and removing speech makes everything more universal. It makes specific characters stand in for everybody, so actions take on fairytale significance. And the writing has to be pared down to represent people as types, too.

I probably live in the best province for independent filmmakers. Manitoba has a sort of thieving-magpie approach, trying to lift productions from other provinces as well as from other countries. It makes it very hard for me to leave.

Shredded feelings are the fuel that feed the machinery of melodrama. And good melodrama just has honest feelings and is honest about the way people interact.

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.