You can’t just lump things into two categories. Things aren’t that simple.

Ang [Lee] gave us a lot of books about cowboys who had been gay or stories about it and all that stuff. And I just talked to a lot of my friends - who [was] their first, particularly same-sex, first situation. That was fascinating to me - trying to learn what that was in a certain period of time. Certain age. The secrecy involved in it. All those things.

I think my family love each other so much and expect so much from each other, and I think we expect a type of honesty in the work that we all do.

To me Donnie Darko was about adolescence. And about how, as soon as you start to grow up and you sort of move out into the world, you realize everything is so trippy. That anything can be anything.

I think it's more, at least at the time, a sense of abstraction. My mind doesn't really work in a way where there's a definitive sense of something. I go one way and then it opens up into a million different ideas, and somehow, when you look at the art, Buddhist art, or particularly Tibetan art, you know, it's a similar thing. All of a sudden there are a million lotus leaves and you're following one to the next and to another, and I related to that, and it felt simple and easy to me. And it made me feel smart.

Sometimes you need an anchor, whatever it might be. You need a space to connect. So often you get into a way of doing things.

I have a mentor. I have... guides. I have a lot of guides. Not a lot, but people whose opinions I really respect and who I will turn to.