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.

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 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 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.

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

I am no longer haunted by my dead father. I am no longer haunted by childhood home. There's so many things I've cured myself of without realising and now when I'm embark on a project I know I'm going to cure myself of it.

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.