Interviews
"I find ghosts in Japanese horror much more terrifying. You have no chances of running away or fighting it; you’re stuck with it forever."
"Though I never had any manifesto or felt like I was on a particular mission, I do feel like it behooves me to make films that no one else will, and I did have a sense, as we did Funny Ha Ha, that it would at the very least be somehow unique."
"What is your responsibility to people whose love you have accepted but maybe you no longer join in that love? Culturally we’ve really talked a lot about taking care of the self, and that’s not necessarily illegitimate, but I think the process of taking care of each other can get lost in the shuffle. That is a big theme for me."
"In the environment in Thailand, everything is mixed. We absorb everything. When you look at Thai food, or fashion, or architecture, it’s like we don’t have any real identity. So I think when I make films I try to express what I experience just living."
"It’s important as a notion when we’re going overseas, whether we’re in Bolivia or Iraq or Afghanistan or France or wherever we happen to be, just because we think we’re right doesn’t mean we’re going to convince other people that we’re right. Other people have a reason for believing what they believe."
"There are many levels of meaning in all my movies, but I don’t think that there is a level that is nobler or wiser than another. If one wants to look at film as pure entertainment and chooses to merely enjoy the nice lighting—it’s perfect for that. But if others want to dig, they can go deeper. But they won’t be more right. They’ll just be deeper."
"When I can use one shot, I won't use a second one. But if you look closely, I often move the camera slightly, often when I'm following the characters. It does have to do with my theater training-there you don't have a camera and are dealing with real space and time issues which I've tried to carry over into my filmmaking."
"I knew that thematically I wanted to do a story about two or more guys who were going to be close at the beginning and because of the introduction of this power and changing what’s at risk, they were not going to be able to be near each other at the end. I didn’t know if they were going to kill each other or if they were going to be at war."
"Whatever you’re appropriating, you’re absorbing it, it’s filtered through your unconscious and it comes back as something else. Wong and I reference multiple things, but we’re not repeating them. Nothing is original, but it can be very personal and the angle, the intention can be very personal."
"It’s true that Los Angeles has always been a city of immigrants—that’s kind of a cliché, but it has a certain truth. When you talk to people, you find that no one was born in Los Angeles, everybody who lives there comes from somewhere else, which is maybe why it doesn’t have a living history based on collective memory."
"I never liked school that much, I never fit into any kind of academic program. I never liked official systems of any kind. Without even thinking about it, I just realized that wasn’t the place for me. I saw it as a long-term process, my filmmaking. I knew it would be a long time coming and I didn’t want to be humiliated right off the bat."
"I try to figure out what the structure of the film I’m writing about should be based on and keeping myself open to not knowing what that means. To play around, get excited, go in a certain direction, then shift things around—it‘s an evolving process."
"Well, I suppose in a certain way I was very conscious that I wanted to make films—I think I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker well before I had the notion of what making films was even about."