I have had moments where I've had mental-health issues and I've felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help.

People don't go to see things in the theater for the same reasons that I do. And movies are about mass audiences. And so moviegoers are going for a different kind of drug than for a certain kind of literary quality.

I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain - that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.

I find as a viewer, when I go to see comedies, the strain to be funny throughout the whole thing. I start to lose my sense of reality, and it ends up feeling like an empty experience; there's funny stuff in it but I've lost the emotional connection to the characters because it's just so bananas.

There are life lessons that can be derived from reality television.

To me, I definitely stand in the corner of wanting to give voice to the bullied, and not the bully.

My impulse is to create an aesthetic that's about a humanistic approach to a world and trying to create compassion for all the characters.