Whitney Houston was a laser beam. . . She always gave me better than what I asked for in the studio
Humans are vulnerable, messy little animals and that's normal. And all I want to do is make a space for that in my films.
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.
The way to misuse our possessions is to use them as an insurance against the morrow. Anxiety is always directed to the morrow, whereas goods are in the strictest sense meant to be used only for to-day.
Happiness does not consist in amusement. In fact, it would be strange if our end were amusement, and if we were to labor and suffer hardships all our life long merely to amuse ourselves. . . . The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement.
I didn't train in directing; I talk to actors the way I talk to anybody.
Traditionally, marriage involved a kind of bartering, rather than mutual inter-dependence or role sharing. Husbands financially and economically supported wives, while wives emotionally, psychologically and socially supported husbands. He brought home the bacon, she cooked it. He fixed the plumbing, she the psyche.