At best, I think of a director as a magnet. You get all the metal fillings in all the individual actors and crew, and get those filings moving toward your magnetic direction.

I do think it is a kind of illness in the sense that it sets you apart, it injects you with an endless, unslakable thirst to keep making the thing. The artist has to voluntarily use themselves endlessly.

I was always very curious about other people. I would always stare and my mother would say - just please close your mouth!

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

In a way, after you're done directing there is a sense of amnesia that washes over you, you can't exactly remember how you did things. It's a zone, just like an athlete, when they can't remember what they did, but somehow got it done.

We all have to embrace the idea not to be worried about there being other women in the room. Gay men work with such solidarity.

Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.