The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who stages scenes with actors, it has always been about the present moment.

I make home movies-therefore I live. I live - therefore I make home movies.

My films are the celebration of reality, of life, of my friends, of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow. We don't pay attention to it when it happens.

Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives you hundreds of grains on that leaf.

I always work only with friends, but it must be about them and myself. Because I film only very personal moments, nothing preplanned, staged or written, it has to be real and spontaneous. Some of them have become famous, some are not yet famous, some will never be famous. But they are all my friends.

As a film-maker and a poet, I feel it's my duty to be an eye and an antenna to what's happening around me. I always felt a solidarity with those who are desperate and confused and misused and are seeking a way out of it.

The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who stages scenes with actors, it has always been about the present moment.