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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.