I'm happy that my films were discovered by chance by foreign film festivals. That makes me realise more that there is a world outside Japan too. For me, it's an occasion to meet many people and to experience directly the response of international audiences to my films. But for me as a director, my attitude towards making films hasn't changed with the fame. I feel it's not good to change as a person anyway

When you are completely satisfied with what you have made, you're pretty much done as a director. So when that happens, that'll sort of be the end.

If you're trying to be realistic and bring real life to the screen, you are going to have different elements. That's what I'm trying to do. As I make the movie, different elements come in naturally.

And if I'm running away from something, I try to make myself face it and overcome that initial fear. As a director, I don't think it's possible to make a movie that you really don't want to make.

It's not really important to make skillful movies. I think expressing yourself really well, skill-wise, is not as important. I want it to be sort of raw and rough but new and fun to watch.

On the times when I used to make movies that were with a lower budget, nobody was expecting it to be a hit, and nobody was paying attention to what I was doing, and it was a free type of creative process. So, one way to reset myself is to go back to that kind of moviemaking.

I think the reason why I have so many movies to my credit is that I never say no to any project, I never veto anything. I sort of challenge myself to do stuff, even if it's something that I've never done before.