Any work of art dignifies life.

I think now more than ever there's so much available honesty that you can find on the Internet. You can go on to YouTube and find really, really vulnerable, really verité stuff. It's not even verité, it's real! It's people confessing very private things. In a world with "It Gets Better" videos where people are trying to keep themselves alive and speak out to other people and are really brave and courageous.

Innovation, sending civilians to outer space, mapping the mind, curing cancer - all these things, they're great. Obviously these same companies are also making a lot of money and accumulating a lot of our data at the same time, which seemed like independent things and one is beneficial and one is problematic for us as individuals, but in the rush of the new I think a lot of the philosophical, ethical, moral, and legal questions don't get asked in time. It's not in our nature to pause, sit, meditate, question, debate. We move forward. Technology generally answers itself with more technology.

But you certainly don't have perspective. And there's so much pressure going into that opening night because you know there's journalists, tons of acquisitions people, and the fate of your film in some ways, if not decided, is really affected by how it screens that night.

And that first screening was overwhelming. You were there. People applauded when the title card comes in; there's a big "gasp moment" partway through the film. It couldn't have gone better, and it was very surreal.

I think the irony of modern life is that our data, our highly personal information, has been taken from us, but in many cases it was given away freely by us. We willfully, consciously or unconsciously, acquiesced and gave it away for a new app, you know? For the products that we have. We didn't read the fine print, or don't even really care and didn't really check to see if we could opt out. No one had to steal it from us.

I don't think in terms of what's going to be successful. I have plenty of friends who make very small movies and friends who make giant, $150 million blockbusters, and the thing that I really admire is, the ones who do it well do it very sincerely.