Very occasionally, if you pay really close attention, life doesn't suck.

The first thing I ever thought of when I thought of Buffy , the movie, was the little...blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed, in every horror movie. The idea of Buffy was to subvert that idea, that image, and create someone who was a hero where she had always been a victim. That element of surprise ... genre-busting is very much at the heart of both the movie and the series.

Stories come from violence, they come from sex. They come from death. They come from the dark places that everyone has to go to, kind of wants to, or doesn't, but needs to deal with. If you raise a kid to think everything is sunshine and flowers, they're going to get into the real world and die. That's the reason fairy tales are so creepy, because we need to encapsulate these things, to inoculate ourselves against them, so that when we're confronted by the genuine horror that is day-to-day life we don't go insane.

I do listen to music. Movie scores, exclusively, because it's all about mood and nonspecificity. I love the way modern movie scoring is all about nonspecificity. You know, if I shuffled the tracks from 'Inception,' I challenge you to tell me which is which.

I've been to two festivals in my life, and I've never been to Toronto. I haven't really been making festival movies. This is new territory for me.

I can do web, comic books, macrame, art.

Inevitably it's going to cause some terrible misogynist backlash, and I assume we'll look forward to eight years of jaw-droppingly sexist statements - the way we listened to eight years of racism around the presidency. It will be an argument before it's a conversation. But at least it's being had.