There's that great Bill Hicks line - the comedian - where he says, "Are you proud to be an American?" "I don't know. It's just where my parents had sex."

I learned to choose my battles. Sometimes I let my producer deal with something that I didn't want to deal with.

And so, however many people watch this thing, that's how many different opinions there will be about it. But I don't feel like it has an agenda in terms of its ideology. It just presents a story like a mirror. It's a mirror more than it is than a distorted mirror.

It's hard to explaining exactly what happened, but I felt in that moment that the divine, however we may choose to define such a thing, surely dwells as much in the concrete and taxi cabs as it does in the rivers, lakes, and mountains. Grace, I realized, is neither time nor place dependent. All we need is the right soundtrack.

In college, you're kind of designing who you want to be. And I wanted to be a big reader.

When I go to movies and I love the movie, it's because it feels like it articulated something about how we're living now, and also gives me some insight into my own life. I feel actually altered after having seen it.

And as a filmmaker, I'm trying to unhook myself from this idea that unless you have a brilliant, long, enormously lucrative theatrical run, that your movie somehow failed. And I don't believe that.