By 1988, I was living in New York myself.

I think I tend to feel discomfort more when I anticipate or arrive upon moments in which I need to be careful. As a gay person, there's the fear of violence, and we're not making that up.

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 try not to articulate ideas in the film once I've arrived on the plot and the characters. I believe that if I focus my attention with enough compassion and heart on those things, then other things will be revealed, and that's from the education that I've had from the novel.

I do love the young adult novels as a form and genre, because it has a purity of intention and heart.

Utopia is something that I think about in connection to an experience I had when I was a kid.

The big change that's happened for me in terms of my own life and how outsidership is reflected in my work is that I used to feel extraordinarily isolated in my life as I was trying to figure out who I was and how to have intimate relationships. And so my central characters also were isolated and usually in quite a bit of pain.