I've worked with non-professional actors, I've worked with movie stars, I've worked with kids, I've worked with older people, and I've found my job as a director is to cast them well and to understand what they need on set to bring the material to life.

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.

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

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

People, for reasons of kind of security, they tend to move towards people like themselves.

I think I tend to feel discomfort more when I anticipate or arrive upon moments in which I need to be careful. As a gay person, there's the fear of violence, and we're not making that up.

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.