If you aren't failing, you aren't trying.
Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.
Grief and memory go together. After someone dies, that's what you're left with. And the memories are so slippery yet so rich.
We never did things as we were supposed to do. That was part of our ethic. We did what felt right to us, not what someone told us we should do.
I would hate to think I'm promoting sadness as an aesthetic. But I grew up in not just a family but a town and a culture where sadness is something you're taught to feel shame about. You end up chronically desiring what can be a very sentimental idea of love and connection. A lot of my work has been about trying to make a space for sadness.
My dad's gay experiences really had a very positive influence on me and my straight relationships - how to better accept all the weirdness and ambiguity and ups and downs and paradoxes. I knew from the beginning I was writing about love.
The littlest thing can have the strongest connection when you're grieving. Your Proustian, poetic nerve is turned up to ten.
In my teens I was interested in photography. Then I decided that I should learn something about the world of commerce. And I came to America at age 17 to escape Europe. I went to NYU - nothing better than being 17 years old and coming to New York.
As a woman filmmaker it's pretty important that you have some basis of confidence that you're coming from, because, as I got closer to LA, there's less and less women. There's less and less mirrors for who you are.
Dreams haunted The Riverworld.
The spiritual is the cause of action. Action is life.