As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.

I'd read Up in the Old Hotel, and I wanted to do something with Mitchell's stuff for a long time.

Every role is approached in exactly the same way, you have to make it believable and that's all. Acting is really serious, like, pretending really hard.

Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk - and collect it.

The most I've ever done was twenty-something, but that's wasn't because I wanted to. I feel like to me it's usually somewhere between two and- no, it's very hard to say because it really depends up on the shot, you know? If it's a complicated master shot and you know that this is the only thing that you're doing for that scene, a complicated one-er, you're going to maybe end up doing a few more takes than you normally would. But I'm not a big believer in doing tons and tons and tons of takes.

If you find that thing you love, it doesn't necessarily matter whether you do it well or not-you just need to do it.

The smaller films just take a longer period of time to build their fan base because people don't see them as soon as they come out in the theater. They see them, after a period of years.