A lot of the people I'm working with are not actors, or it's their first time in a movie. I'm not trying to shape performances, coax performances out of them. It's more like I want to put them in situations that naturally work or allow them to be themselves. If it's not happening, I'll just completely switch it up, rather than trying to make it work.

My relationship with my wife is fraught with all of the problems that any couples face, but there is a sense of humor that we have about it and a real desire to want to make it better.

We're looking for a certain kind of realism or naturalism, and we go about it in different ways, but I think we're all striving for the same end result, which is to capture the patterns of conversations and how people interact in a very realistic way.

[Having bigger budget] allowed me to be a full-time filmmaker for a couple months and not have to have a day job and be balancing a bunch of other stuff. It allowed me to bring in all these people from different parts of the country. It allows me to have an actual food budget, where we could eat healthy for the month we were shooting. It makes all the difference in the world.

There's a lot of cultural pressure around specialness and seeing your family. I feel like everything gets jacked up a little bit because of all of these expectations of love and family bonding.

There's something really nice about missing the person you're with. To have someone be apart enough to force independence and to also look forward to seeing that person.

The more that I work with people that I don't know, the more I invite somebody in who's potentially going to really hate being there.