Belgrade has kind of a Dublinesque, dear-dirty charm.

You never want to make a "message movie," but you always want to be talking about something that you care about.

You come out of each movie just thinking, "God, if we can fool them into letting us make just one more, we can get it right."

Belgrade has kind of a Dublinesque, dear-dirty charm.

I do think that I'm a big believer in having an idea or having ideas and just tucking them away in the back of your brain. Even if you aren't consciously thinking of them, I think they simmer. You're working on them, even if you don't know you're working on them, and I think having something in your head for a while is a valuable thing.

If I spend a year and a half writing a script, the first year will be outlining in notebooks. It's just the way I work, definitely not necessarily the best way.

I'm definitely a big believer in the notion that a heightened style can get you closer to an authentic human experience than so-called realism on film. There are films I love that have kind of a muted or realistic style, but for me on any given day I have more moments during the course of a day that feel like a Fellini movie than I do a Cassavettes movie.