Directing action scenes is really just pure visual storytelling that just makes sense to me pretty intuitively.
'Twin Peaks' was my gateway for David Lynch.
I used to be terrified of heights as a kid.
A lot of people who make films in my generation have the vocabulary of all the films they've seen before.
Most of the time, I'm a little bewildered or sort of feel out of place.
I'm an immigrant, and I think being an outsider in your home is something that I really relate to.
Two things - one is obvious: always keep making. The second thing, with regard to music videos specifically - the music video industry can be a place that takes advantage of young freelancers and filmmakers. Make sure you're making stuff that you're proud of and you can get behind.
'Atlanta' changes genres a lot per episode.
The weird thing about having an alligator on set is that you can't be in the direct line of sight, or they might start charging at you.
We always talk about how, obviously, there is still very in-your-face aggressive racism. But there's a lot of passive racism that, in the moment, you don't even realize is racist. You chalk it up as a strange interaction you had, and then you look at the context of it later on and realize the root of it was racism.
The most difficult thing about music videos is that a lot of young filmmakers come into the medium, and they have so many different ideas, but they need to understand what the musician wants.
I grew up listening to hip hop and embracing black culture, probably because it was 'outsider art.'
I got into film school thinking I was going to make features, like every other film geek.
Whenever you're making something, you're hoping that it connects with somebody in some big way, but I'd have to be crazy to expect that.
I'll listen to a song so much that ideas start to form out of daydreaming. It's as if I'm reverse-scoring the track and building visuals around a specific beat or riff that's grabbed me.
A lot of weird things happen in life that are not always pertaining to your main objective.
Your understanding of culture can be very skewed sometimes, depending on what you're taking in!
When we were making 'Teddy Perkins,' we were playing with a lot of horror tropes and things you might've seen in movies before, but we get the ability to subvert expectations or get a comedic element out of a horror moment.
I think music videos in particular and film in general - it's really good at communicating tone and feeling.
In Japan, animation is a big part of your media diet. I moved out to Los Angeles at 9, and when I got homesick, I would watch anime.
