Fear creates its own self-fulfilling dynamic- as people give into it, they lose energy and momentum. Their lack of confidence translates into inaction that lowers confidence levels even further, on and on.

It looks like I had the most irrelevant education than anybody in the planet could have.

If we were controlling the performance, we never would have had someone push a button to make the pellet stove come on during a climatic moment. And after the loud pellet stove moment, which is like a Todd Haynes's Safe interruption into the home and into the narrative - as if the home is a like a ghost surrounding the characters - her performance changes entirely.

Your work is the single greatest means at your disposal for expressing your social intelligence.

One could draw up all different kinds of adversity depending on what your weakness is.

Those qualities that separate us are often ridiculed by others or criticized by teachers. Because of these judgments, we might see our strengths as disabilities and try to work around them in order to fit in. But anything that is peculiar to our makeup is precisely what we must pay the deepest attention to and lean on in our rise to mastery.

I think I can do whatever I want with fiction, but the more documentary it is, the better it will be because that's what I'm good at. I'm good at observing people's behavior and putting these unspoken things into movie contexts in ways that other people can sometimes miss.