Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.

I'm not an analytical person, so it's not my job to even know what the hell the thing meant. It's not my problem. I'm just supposed to do it. Sometimes, people have explained things to me that I might have been semi-conscious of or not.

When I studied with Nicholas Ray he was always telling us, "If you want to make films, watch a lot of films, but don't just watch films, go take a walk, look at the sky, read a book about meteorology, look at the design of people's shoes. Because all of them are part of filmmaking." So I thought, perfect! That's a good job for me.

I didn't get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.

I realized, "Gee, you're making the same film over and over here." I just kept making them for my own amusement, but also with this thought in my head that I could collect enough songs to make an album out of it. I am attracted to non-dramatic moments in life. The idea of a coffee break is not something you'd think of as being an important part of your day, so these shorts were like little free zones in which we could just play around.

I think of myself as an amateur filmmaker, not a professional, in the sense that "amateur" means love of something, for the form.

I like marginal characters, I like real people. I learn more from talking to my plumber when he comes to fix my toilet than I do from meeting a movie star. I think my movies are in the same vein as that.