I never start with the story first, which is maybe obvious, because the narrative line of my films is really not that strong or dramatic. They're very simple.

America is a very venal place; everything has to be sold there. You can repackage your own s**t and sell it if it is marketed in the right way. The motivation is to sell. It's so illogical and strange to me. It's such a disposable culture and yet I feel comfortable being American.

I still consider myself to be an amateur filmmaker. And I say that because in the Latin origin of the word amateur is the word love, and it's love of a form, whereas professional implies something you do for money or for work.

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 hate those live action versions of animated cartoons. It ruins everything, the whole point of cartoons is to get away from photographs. I mean it would be stupid to say that cartoons are better than photographs but its true.

I love riding on a bus now because you're looking down on the world from not too high of an angle, but people on the street rarely look up into the bus. They're sort of oblivious to this big giant machine, you know, passing by. So there's something very beautiful about the angle that you look at the world through.

You are the accumulations of your experiences at any given point. And when you express something those things come out. The thing is I hate seeing my films when I'm done with them, so I don't look back as a chart of my life, but I leave it as a kind of chart. Though, it is a photograph, captured.