In the old days when I first was coming up, you would turn up on set in the morning with your coffee, script, and hangover and you would figure out what you were going to do with the day and how you were going to play the scenes. You would rehearse and then invite the crew in to watch the actors go through the scenes. The actors would go away to makeup and costume and the director and the DP would work out how they were going to cover what the actors had just done.

In America, they shoot budgets and schedules, and they don't shoot films any more. There's more opportunity in Europe to make films that at least have a purity of intent.

Half of NYC's homeless populations are families.Homeless people have been ignored for too long. I'll just say this: If you are a family on the brink of eviction you are 80% less likely to get evicted if you have legal counsel. However, there is no right to legal counsel in housing court.It would cost the city $12,500 to grant that family legal counsel. Meanwhile, the average stay for a homeless family in a shelter once they have been evicted cost the city $45,000. So not only does it seem like the right thing to do morally, it's also the right thing to do fiscally.

I think when you're trying to produce a relationship on screen that doesn't actually exist, perhaps sometimes there's a temptation to look at each other more, to touch each other more...

I don't want to infantilize the actor; I want to empower the actor. Actors can be many things, but all of the really good ones are really great storytellers, and I'm interested in that. If you're not interested in that as a director then you better be Stanley Kurbrick.

I wanted to know as the director how the actors wanted to tell this story I wanted to know what they thought.

I realized that this story [Shelter] is all about family, family loss, and how it influences you day to day life.