I'm a gay man of colour.
Violence doesn't interest me very much.
'Sound of My Voice' had been written before 'Another Earth.'
I like how collaborative and cult-like filmmaking is. It's really family-oriented, tribe-oriented.
I remember in grade school having a group of friends and enjoying that sense of community, enjoying living in an imaginary world that wasn't just by yourself or your sibling but a whole group of people.
Sarah Polley's 'Stories We Tell,' James Ponsoldt's 'The Spectacular Now,' Destin Daniel Cretton's 'Short Term 12' - these are really important movies.
Any director who's willing to be brave not only in terms of subject matter but also in terms of being emotional and moving you is what inspires me.
I love being on a movie set.
I think about a lot of my favorite directors, and I think about their first films, and I have great admiration for the earthiness of those films.
When I was 14, I saw 'Terminator 2.' My mind was blown. What a beautiful movie. I found it really deep and also so entertaining.
I'm very fascinated by genre.
That's the beauty of filmmaking: it's extremely humbling because you do it all over again all the time.
I think that 'Sound of My Voice' is about the claustrophobia of living today, and how do you crawl out of the claustrophobia towards the light?
I think we have to go through a lot of rituals in order to fill the gap of meaning in our lives.
Claustrophobia is a theme that I feel is really rife in 'Sound of my Voice' and struggling to come up for air from that feeling.
A novel is both a story and a piece of writing. A movie is a story and a piece of filmmaking.
It's not easy to learn to trust someone and let someone trust you.
You can't just express yourself and it becomes a movie. You have to get beyond that.
It doesn't really matter what someone's hair looks like or if the sound is perfect. Every director who's made a couple of movies knows that, because you can replace the sound. Or, like, any one shot is not that important, because they all add up together.
A director really doesn't deal with performance that much, especially if you deal with great actors. Their work is the performance. What you're helping them with is all the stuff they cannot be in control of.
