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.

The New York School poets are my godfathers creatively.

There is something very pleasurable about watching cartoons, a really warm, comfortable feeling. My taste is quite broad, but most of all I like American cartoons. Early Disney, Betty Boop, Roadrunner, Ren & Stimpy, South Park. Sometimes I'll watch Pokemon or bad 80s cartoons.

I like that cartoons are now not only animated drawings, they are a way of doing something: 'That song sounds very cartoony', or 'He has a cartoon face'. Like the word 'poetic', which usually means something different than a poem. But most of all cartoons are comforting, that's the real reason I need them.

I start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It's always a real collaboration for me.

It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going.

The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It's part of America.