Interviews
"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."