I went to see Chicago after I finished shooting, and say what you want about it, but that thing was so meticulously planned. It was planned like NASA planned its trips to the moon. It made me feel like some sort of horrible dilettante.

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

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.

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 you sit in on a film class with students, their big complaint is "That's not like real life." They don't realize that they don't really want to watch real life. They don't want to sit and watch a security camera. There's a strong gravity in all of us as viewers - even in myself now and then - to want to see real life depicted. But you're looking for it in the wrong places. It's in little allegories, in something removed.

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.

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.