Somebody like Mailer brings to that role everything that he stands for. The types of characters that I gravitate towards, the types of icons, tend to have a heavy physicality in that way.

A lot of these angles are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted.

A lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn't have an ego when it's wanting to throw up. It just does it

[I have a] way of making narrative sculpture, where first you make a text and out of that text you make objects. [...] I start with a story and then I make sculpture from that story, it's just that the stories become more and more elaborate.

I'm less interested in skin than in fascia -- connective tissue.

Jackass: The Movie is great. I think it's in the tradition of physical comedy, which I'm really interested in. Its relationship to gravity, and how gravity acts on the body

I don't think my work is so strange. It's just a matter of having the discipline to go the whole way with an idea, to stretch it as far as it can go.