For me, making a movie is kind of like vomiting. Not that film is like vomit, but more like this mass of ideas and thoughts that you have and just have to put them out there. It's not even about making perfect sense - it's more about making perfect nonsense. I don't do too much soul-searching or self-analysis. I just enjoy making things.

Often the biggest dreamers get hurt the most. They were pure in their insanity and in their isolation. They were living the dream amongst themselves and didn’t realize it. It’s when they invited the public inside their world that everything went wrong.

I see things in a specific way. All the films are different. There are specific characters and scenes and locations and ideas. There are colors I want to see. There are movements and things ... The films are different, but the approach is the same.

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 just haven't let myself get to a place where I've felt a part of any kind of a community, so I've always stayed outside of it.

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.

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.