My movie [The Neon Demon] is a hyper-version of the obsession with beauty. As this crazy obsession grows, longevity does not. Everything seems to become younger and younger. The girls and people around them cannibalize themselves.

I always say I have a Danish passport, but I am a New Yorker at heart.

I can't make a film that I don't feel comfortable with.

I think the idea was to make a horror film that became a science-fiction film with a lot of melodramatic tropes.

The problem with cinema nowadays is that it's a math problem. People can read a film mathematically; they know when this comes or that comes; in about 30 minutes, it's going to be over and have an ending. So film has become a mathematical solution. And that is boring, because art is not mathematical.

The thing with Ryan, you can look at him for hours. Very few actors have that. It's a gift.

I am a child of cinema, and I am a cineaste, so everything I do is a reference to something I've heard or experienced or seen. And we all do it, we all steal. The ones who claim they don't, are obviously lying, because you do. You just have to make it your own.