If you're a prostitute, this is your day: You party, you have customers until four or six in the morning, then you sleep. You wake at noon, watch soaps on TV, take two or three hours to fancy up yourself, and then you start waiting for customers. That's your life. And some days no customers come. There's no party. There's nothing. You sit there and wait. If you're educated you can read books, but in Bangladesh and most other places you watch TV or listen to music or cook.

The most important thing is to find people that you enjoy - friends that you enjoy playing music with.

If you connect with someone just once, that's something. But if you can connect twice, that's something else.

Prostitution will always exist in every society, so I believe in a fair trade. Open the doors for women to earn their money without having pimps. The worst thing is to criminalize it, because then you open the doors for pimps, criminals, and trading.

On one hand, they [prostitutes] don't struggle because it's simply their life. In Mexico and elsewhere, once they get out of these places [brothels] they have a pretty square life.

La Zona is such a closed area, a dangerous, outlaw area. My time in the Zona was a time outside of society, almost out of the real world. And the girls there had such a sense of irony and sarcasm. They were also really interested in my film. They'd be like, "Thank God we live in Mexico, because our kind of prostitution has a heart. We wouldn't want to sit behind a glass cage or be sold by our own mothers. We have free will."

I think beauty is the splendor of truth, so if the people I portray think they're beautiful, they're beautiful. I don't make them that way.