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.

I literally designed and built the sets myself, and I kind of liked it. I always gave myself eight weeks to do that - sometimes even 10 - and the shooting took five or six weeks.

I love Toronto's long autumns, warm with windy swirls of golden spores, redolent with giant, sun-roasted leaves flapping up and down the streets, and horrible winter always seeming far, far off!

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.

It's funny how film is the slowest art form to adapt to freedom. It's had freedom all along. It could've done whatever it wanted to. You know the same freedom that do-it-yourself punk and post-punk musicians had in the late 70s and ever since. That's about the time I started getting interested in film, and I assumed that film would be moving along with the other pop culture forms. Its finally done it but it's taken decades for it to catch up just to basement band level.

The bone-breaking thing is something that I put in many narratives.

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.