For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional.

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

My early films were about self discovery, and films of internal conflict. At that level, they were very personal.

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.

I think my movie addresses the struggles of communities facing class distinctions, which are timeless. The questions of how we live together and what we do for money are really the stuff of drama.

So there's a choice that I made to tell stories that are still psychological melodramas about domestic issues. The challenge is to figure out how to make 10 films a career as a filmmaker, and that's a really challenging thing.

When working on and writing a film, I'm often more of a sponge than other times, aware of what's going on around me.