To be a creative person and be a professional, as an artist you have to be able to withstand pain, rejection, and for some, a lot of bad feelings, but you have to be able to look through those.

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

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.

As a father, I wanted to make a movie that my kids can love.

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

All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That’s what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.