Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.

I'm very interested in variations.

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

I consider myself a feminist, in a way.

I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.

When I left Ohio when I was 17 and ended up in New York and realised that not all films had the giant crab monsters in them, it really opened up a lot of things for me.

Jim Jarmusch: Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.