"I have a long-standing interest in mental illness. I have friends who suffer from it. I think it’s a devastating illness, not only mentally, psychologically, emotionally, but also economically. I think it isolates people tremendously, and again, I want to try and engender some empathy for people who suffer."
“Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.”
“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”
“Walk the Walk is built on the idea that the objects are much more imposing and permanent than our bodies; that our bodies are extremely fragile and transient against this monstrous cage that we’ve constructed for ourselves, made of all the machines and technology and objects that clutter the planet.”
“What fascinates me are people who want to be one thing but who behave in a way contradictory to that. Who might say, ‘I want to be happy, but I keep doing things that make me unhappy.”
“The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on.”
“I like working in a really private way. I mean, we got as far as a cut of [Old Joy] without speaking to any kind of lawyer or anything. We got into Sundance before we thought we should form a company. Aside from a lot of sound work and stuff still to go, it was all very private, and that’s a dream for me.”
“I was raised a Catholic and when you're raised a Catholic they don't teach you to think for yourself...you're taught not to think too deeply about things.”
“I think that the main impact on my work, on the making of this film, came from the intensity of the similarity I felt to Edvard Munch as a man, as an artist, as someone who struggled throughout his life.”
“I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.”