I am a lifelong career artist, which itself is a bit of a miracle. It's really challenging to be a career artist. I would say that the argument for grant funding is not only did my movie do some social good - hopefully it opened people's eyes - but you created a working artist. I'm hiring cinematographers, I'm hiring production designers, I'm hiring producers.

Chloë Moretz as Carrie has an inherent amount of charisma, the camera loves her, she's been acting since she's five, she's a total pro, she knows her instrument. I took her on this phenomenal journey from a confident child star who has the great privileges of a family who loves her, great success, and huge confidence, to a wounded woman who had to gain her confidence back and desperately wanted love and acceptance.

If I even tell anything false, within one minute I have to come clean. And I think most people, even if they're not that direct, it comes out in indirect ways. If somebody cheats on you, they end up telling you they've been spending all this time hanging out with that person. Why? Because nobody can bear a lie. A lie won't stay silent. It makes noise.

The first thing a fascist regime does is burn books. To not have them around would mean to make sure they're not written in the first place.

Art changed my life. I mean, I would say art saved me. I believe that it made me better at handling my life.

In The Shining, you love Shelley Duvall. You love Jack Nicholson. You're let into the intimacy of that violence and it's emotional and it's physical. We're let in very close. So I think a good horror film has to pull you in very deeply inside. Halloween is a good horror film because we love Jamie Lee Curtis, we're brought very deeply in right when she's babysitting the kids. She's going from house to house, all those houses have windows that you can look in. We're a very vulnerable and exposed audience.

I think there are a lot of writers who would never have an opportunity to make their work. Some presses rely heavily on the NEA. Translators cannot support themselves on translating. It would be isolating artistically. It would diminish experimental output. It would have a homogenizing effect on the work that was made.