To come to change, there had to be conflict and pain.

Everything encourages you not to tell stories of gay lives. There is no economy yet for that kind of cinema.

People, for reasons of kind of security, they tend to move towards people like themselves.

You are always factoring in the economy within the process of creating something, and making decisions that seem both fearless and full of fear.

I tend not to think that anything I happen to be reporting on in my films is special. Meaning that people are always saying to me, 'you must love New York, you have it in all your films.' But mostly it's because I know New York, and I know Brooklyn at this time. I know the lives there, because I have lived in them.

I can be incredibly angry with someone, I can be incredibly critical, but... I went through a period where I was reading a lot of memoirs of guards in holocausts and serial killers. I like to understand why people do bad things.

I'm someone who can create critiques of individuals based on their economic history. That's one way I look at people in terms of one story that could be told purely in a Marxist construction.