You want everything for your kids that you didn't have, but that that very desire can pollute and corrupt the good, basic American pluckiness, resourcefulness and down-to-earthness that we like to pride ourselves with, and result in aspirations of wealth and high culture.

In fact, to me it's liberating to not think of identity as some organic property that we have to find and stick to, but actually something that is constructed, or that's imposed, that we can then counter by taking a different route and re-dressing it, and then re-dressing it again, and then re-dressing it again.

I liked to act in plays when I was a kid, and then in college. But that's the last time I really acted. I always loved it. But my interests were more in looking at the whole, rather than getting completely swallowed up in a single part of the whole.

In male-driven [films], the protagonist is not the person who's necessarily in harms way. There's a sense that they're going to figure out how to persevere and take on the obstacles and foes and you don't necessarily know if that's going to happen with the subjects of love stories.

I always bring it up to my lawyer every now and then. And another reason we have to revisit it is because there is a restoration going on right now for the film through UCLA and Sundance.

I think that's what I love about glam-rock. It invited you to participate. It asked you to change yourself in all these different ways, or offered up all these options.

I know a bit about his [Sirk] life, but it's more about his style than biography. He was European and came out of a theater background, and could easily be defined as 'Brechtian.' He was expressionistic in his films, and was an example of those intensely intellectual artists who ended up working for American studios, and was handed the Ladies Home Journal and asked to adapt the stories for the screen. He found ways to use his artistry to make them interesting and nuanced, while critiquing American values in the process.