Life is beautiful. Really, it is. Full of beauty and illusions. Life is great. Without it, you'd be dead.

I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze through it until the next scene. That was the thing about vaudeville: You didn't have to worry about the beginning and ends of these things.

Even Gene Kelly: I always preferred him to Fred Astaire, just because he was more athletic, like skateboarding. His leaps were big. There was something really great about his moves.

I've just always liked watching people dance. I can't explain it. It used to just make me laugh. Sometimes you can tell a lot about a person by the way they shake their ass.

The first time I hung out with [David Blaine], he took me to this condemned building, and it had a pizza oven and he crawled into the pizza oven and turned the heat on to 400 degrees or something like that, and he stayed in it for I guess a half hour. He came out, and except for one or two second-degree burns, he was unscathed. You meet a lot of musicians and filmmakers and actors, but it's rare to meet someone who can step inside a pizza oven and take the heat. I was intrigued by that.

I've always been pulled toward people who can't seem to make anything fit. It's like a cinema of isolation, of loneliness. They go outside the system and create their own society to develop their obsession to an insane degree.

I like working with family and friends and people I admire. All my movies are filled with family members of some capacity. I think it means more when you have a personal relationship with someone.