Growing up in the Philippines, I loved all kinds of movies. We had a very healthy film industry there when I was a child. It's now gotten very limited. They only make action movies and hard-core exploitation movies. Women get raped; men get shot.

I don't believe in sampling some Tibetan music just to make it sound groovy, but you do your homework, you understand what you're doing with it.

I think for a lot of so-called post-colonial peoples, there's a feeling of not being quite legitimate, of not being pure enough.

There were also horror shows on the radio. Very terrifying and thrilling to me as a kid. They had all these creepy sound effects. They would come on at ten o'clock at night, and I just would scare myself to death.

Everything matters. Time is precious.

I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.

My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify.