Directing, to me, starts even before we get to the set. Directing is a fluid, an abstract thing. It's not done only purely in the moment. It's an idea that you plant before. It's a location that you show. It's something I whisper in someone's ear. It's a freeform thing. It only takes me a week to write the script, but it's years that you're thinking about it. The execution is really the fast part.

I tried working odd jobs that had nothing to do with creating, and it was difficult for me. In the end, I just always loved movies. When I'm making a film I feel most alive, like I'm doing the right thing, and I'm in the place where I need to be.

For certain things, certain audiences, people will laugh. And in other places, there's dead silence. And I enjoy them both. You try to make films where it's never one way - like life.

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.

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.

If Richard Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the 'Great Art Form' would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.