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.

I actually feel that all drama has an element of comedy in it. A great deal of that I learned from writers like Chekhov who called his plays his comedy even when they touch on tragedy.

I do love the young adult novels as a form and genre, because it has a purity of intention and heart.

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

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

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.