I'm interested in how innocence fares when it collides with hard reality.
From stoplights to skyscrapers, turn anywhere in civilization and you will see imagination at work. It's in our inventions, advances and remedies and how a single parent masterminds each day. Imagination is boundless, surrounds us and resides in us all.
Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.
'Precious' is strangely uplifting. It goes down into the valley but it also goes to the mountain tops. A lot of difficult realities are explored in 'Precious,' but the peaks make the valleys and the valleys make the peaks.
I was always writing scripts, and I had made several shorts, before and after film school. But I worked a variety of temp positions over the years.
I don't have to go into outer space to write about an astronaut.
My brothers were the ones who taught me about mythology and storytelling, and showed me how to do stop-motion animation.
I think if you get your fifth script made, that's the fast track. But there's no guarantee any of them will get made.
I think there are many more stories still to be told about women.
The brutality that can take place in a crime film heightens the tenderness that can also be there.
I often think about the many remarkable things that my personal computer can do which I never ask it to do. I probably use a small fraction of its capabilities. I often wonder if the same dynamic occurs with our capacity for creativity.
In these times of stress, snark, division and despair, I still suspect that two of the most important features we possess are imagination and a capacity for goodness. Those are qualities for which we will be remembered most fondly.
If humanity is being swallowed by a modern primitivism, imagination might be the thing that saves us all.
There is so much talent out there and not quite as much opportunity.
It's so easy today to get swept up in celebrity fixation and materialism and searching for some validation outside of yourself when we know it's really found within and through meaningful connections with other people.
There are few films where you have women really driving the plot.
Women have a greater verbal capacity.
You only get one world premiere of your directorial debut.
I love so many different genres. I love crime films - and unusual coming-of-age pieces.
It's always healthy to be taken down a notch, even though it's humbling.
