It feels to me like everyone is going to do their best work when they feel emotionally safe.

Making art, being creative, is risky, especially for actors, but everybody on the set is being creative. You're putting yourself out there with ideas, and to have your brain be free of stress so that it can actually do its best work, it feels like you want to have a real sense of intimacy and connection and trust with everybody.

I can't wait to do a fully improvised script again, to find people who are really comfortable and into it. It's about the capabilities of the people you're working with, what are their strengths and weaknesses. Some of the most brilliant actors need the spine of the text to work off of, and there's no shame in that; they're actors, not writers.

All we really want in life is to connect to other human beings, and when you desperately want to connect physically to one specific human being and you can't? That's something I find compelling.

I'm drawn again and again to relationships between people who really, really want to connect and just can't get out of their own way to do it.

I'm not one of those directors who can just kind of walk away from the edit room and come back and check in.

My mom was in education, and I remember reading in one of her books about multiple intelligences - this whole theory about how there are all these different ways you can be intelligent, like eight or 10 of them or something. And one of them is emotional.