I wanted to just be a filmmaker, and I thought I wanted to do all the aspects, and it seemed like as a producer was the best way to do it, because I could have... You never have control on a movie, but you have as much control as you can.

Well, any time you do anything good, it's man versus himself, right? That's the art, the challenge.

There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America, but I remember as being a very, very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air; the punk rock movement made sense.

I've seen the people who talk about their love lives in print invariably have doomed relationships with the person they're talking about.

If you wanna give me an award, I'll take it. Just don't make me go to the party afterwards.

I never wanted to come off as self-important.

When applied to politics and taken to its extreme, kitsch is the mask of death. Fascism was all aesthetics. There was no core principle to it. There was no truth to it.