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.

For me, an actor is really, first and foremost, a person and an individual, more than they are an actor or a professional.

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

I try not to articulate ideas in the film once I've arrived on the plot and the characters. I believe that if I focus my attention with enough compassion and heart on those things, then other things will be revealed, and that's from the education that I've had from the novel.

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

I make films that are very personal, and I always have. It's kind of the only thing that I think I have to offer as a filmmaker: the intimacy I've had with experience in a particular world, so the film comes from things I've seen and things I've felt. It gets transformed by the process. I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

My early films were about self discovery, and films of internal conflict. At that level, they were very personal.