Maybe that sounds a bit pretentious, but I think life experience is always more important than technical knowledge.

I think of filmmaking as a form of communication. Maybe it's also an art, but that's for somebody else to decide.

Am I nostalgic for film? … I mean, it’s had a good run, hasn’t it? You know, I’m not nostalgic for a technology. I’m nostalgic for the kind of films that used to be made that aren’t being made now.

I want a script to affect me in some way. I am usually drawn to character studies, scripts about real people and the world we live in not some fantasy.

When I first started, I saw myself shooting documentaries or making documentaries, which is what I did, mostly, for a number of years. So it was quite a surprise how I found myself shooting features. It was like my wildest dreams as a kid collided.

When you move the camera, or you do a shot like the crane down (in Shawshank) with them standing on the edge of the roof, then it's got to mean something. You've got to know why you're doing it; it's got to be for a reason within the story, and to further the story.

There are some sequences in films that I think work filmicly, that stand out to me, but thats much more to do with the staging and the cutting and the mood of the thing as a sequence, the way everything comes together.