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

There was an age in which it was clear to me that my parents weren't perfect, but then there was an age at which I had empathy for that. And that was through therapy, probably. You have to rebuild and you also have to grow in your understanding of whatever it is your parents are facing, and that takes a major, profound shift of perspective from being a child.

I think as a gay person, there was no way in my generation to not grow up with shame and a sense of being wrong. It was impossible to avoid. Externally, you might make choices that are very public and very open but internally that was a struggle.

The praise helps on a deep level, which gives you the grounding that encourages you to trust yourself. On another level, each film is a risk, and the praise doesn't save you from that risk.

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

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.

The questions of economics, and how they infect, or rather how they affect intimacy. And that's probably the subject of all my films.