I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters.

Documentaries - my God, there is so much going on in our country and in the world today that every time you open the newspaper or turn on the radio or watch the news on TV there is another documentary subject. We're getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what's really the story there?

If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something.

I like finding a great shot and then just staying with it for a long time, not trying to pump things up with some kind of artificial energy by cutting.

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

I've never had a good game plan. At a certain point, making independent films became more and more appealing to me because I like freshness and originality.

It's a funny thing with documentary films - you want them to feel as entertaining and as gripping as a fictional film. With a fictional film you want it to feel as realistic as a documentary film.