Ego is something that everybody, creative especially, has to grapple with. You need enough ego to keep going but not so much ego that you're deaf or blind, that you're making a mistake and can't fix the course.

I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn't interest me as much.

I think that it's fear. The musicians themselves don't seem to know enough about why they're in the positions they're in, so they're afraid to lose those positions. If you're 22 years old and you can't believe you're even in the position to have a career making music, the first thing you're going to think is: Maintain. Don't lose it. And that's precisely what causes you to lose everything.

A lot of people go to the movies wanting the movie to be about feelings, and it's really not about that. Or rather it's about feelings in the abstract.

My working life is me doing what I want to do. This is that. I've made movies that people don't go to see.

The muscle memory of filtering away all the wrong versions of what you're doing improves the more time you're on a film set. I feel like my problem-solving algorithm got kicked up a notch.

If you're going to make a movie for ten thousand you can talk everybody into doing it for free. You could make a really good-looking movie right for ten grand, if you have an idea.