Seances is an internet project where I intended to adapt at least a hundred and maybe three hundred lost films into ten and twenty minute long fragmentary versions. We then uploaded them to an internet archive that fragmented them even more. We treated them like shreds of lost movie spirits and allowed these spirits to interrupt each other in non-consecutive collisions that formed new movies.

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.

Older recordings just seemed to take me somewhere into my own pre-history. That's always been an interesting, sort of sphinx-like territory for me to wander around in.

I feel the need to chastise myself. A movie that's a partial musical, full-on melodrama, should require a tremendous amount of planning.

I'm a nervous wreck. If it's a 20-day shoot, at lunchtime on the first day, I'm thinking "Only 19 and a half days to go... I can make it!"

I guess to the outside observer, all my movies look like musty old black-and-white artifacts, but my earlier movies had been more static and tableaux-ish.

I just discovered that there were so many lost movies that were all mine to take if I wanted to take them. I was drunk on greed when I encountered this motherlode of utterly fascinating narratives that time's great river washed up on its banks for me to just scavenge, and not even rub clean, just repurpose and take credit for. It was kind of one of those weird dreams that where you keep finding free money.