I never get tired of looking at her [Catherine Keener] and it always surprises me, despite how many hours of film I've shot on that face. She's fantastic. She does comedy and tragedy so equally well. She wears her feeling so on the surface for both. I try to stop myself from casting her but I just keep coming back to her. She's just so fantastic to work with.

I hear a lot of, "We want to make a movie with you." Then "No, we don't want to make this one. We want to make that other movie with you." I don't really get that and it's very frustrating. It angers me. Because my movies are my movies.

Hollywood always likes to create a star.

People say to me all the time that I threw some money into some guy's coffee cup [by accident, thinking they were poor]. People do make the same sort of mistake. I've made attempts to volunteer that have been calamitous!

That said, it was pretty awkward and a weird thing to shoot. Some women had a sense of humour about it and we'd laugh, but some were very serious and suspicious... like I might be doing something bad, or maybe they were just uncomfortable.

I hear people talk in my head and I write it down. I choose where they live and how they dress to be real. That person wouldn't wear that. That person wouldn't say that. She can't afford to live like that. All that bullshit that so many movies have in them. I don't want to see that.

I do think things like old furniture and art are arbitrarily assigned. And I say that coming from an uneducated place in terms of, you know... art... curating. But who's to say what's valuable and what's not? I guess I feel like in the end it's all pretty meaningless 'cause we're all going to die.