My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me.
I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films.
If you put up posters around town for high-school kids, high-school kids will come. If you're casting politicians, you can't put up posters and have politicians come down.
Because I didn't have brothers, I was always interested in the kids down the street that had four brothers in their family, so I became one of them - but it was not my family.
I've always been attracted to temporary families.
The biopic also wasn't a form that I necessarily believed in, because you can never really get it right, you know? It's also a form that's very popular - the straight-ahead biopic.
There are all kinds of ways that people present their films, but that's kind of a good feeling, if you can make it seem like the characters are really there.
Usually when I read something, first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it, I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.
Sometimes, the people who are helping you can drop the ball.
If it were up to the executives, they probably wouldn't have directors at all.
I had never had a positive leading character - somebody that wasn't an antihero, or who wasn't more of a guy that you're supposed to be on the side of.
I had wanted to do a comedy.
Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot, you still can't. It's still your own film.
Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the '80s.
I've always been interested in how to present something that relates to our reality - which is not really... I don't even know if documentary itself does as good a job. It has its own problems in trying to get at the reality of the situation.
The things that inform student culture are created and controlled by the unseen culture, the sociological aspects of our climbing culture, our 'me' generation, our yuppie culture, our SUVs, or, you know, shopping culture, our war culture.
