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.

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 try to keep feeling what's going on and try to use the camera, the actors and the design to enhance those feelings. There's something really emotionally direct and honest about how I put the material with the images. You hope that the strength of mise-en-scene comes from an honesty towards the material. You also hire really well.

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

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

By 1988, I was living in New York myself.

To me, honesty and the difficulty of honest communication are at the heart of both my life and my movies. The difficulty of being yourself.