I never examined my role in male culture, in hyper masculinity. I never examined it, nobody ever called me on it.

For the women out there that I've hurt with my male privilege, I'm sorry.

How many films are there about friendships between teenagers? And how many projects are there dealing with friendships among adults? True friendships - really dealing with the intimacy behind what happened then, and how long you've known each other, and the wounds that haven't healed. That's what [About Alex] film is about.

When I walk home at night I don't have to worry about anything. But when a woman walks home at night she gotta think about a lot of different things.

The crazy thing is a lot of people - a lot of men, if I'm just speaking for myself - don't really start thinking about the effect of hyper-masculinity and false definitions of what it means to be a man until you get married or until you have kids. Because then all of sudden you have something to protect.

I can't remember ever having a conversation about the definition of consent when I was a kid. I knew that no meant no, but that's it.

A lot of those old ideas are dying with the people who created them, and there's this new generation of filmmaker that's saying, "We're in this together, these are issues that we all deal with, let's just present issues to screen without bias and figure out what the audience has to say about them."