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.

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.

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.

You are always factoring in the economy within the process of creating something, and making decisions that seem both fearless and full of fear.

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

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

I tend not to think that anything I happen to be reporting on in my films is special. Meaning that people are always saying to me, 'you must love New York, you have it in all your films.' But mostly it's because I know New York, and I know Brooklyn at this time. I know the lives there, because I have lived in them.