I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films.
Usually when I read something, first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it, I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.
I myself am mixed race - my mother is Korean, and my father is an American Jew - so I've always felt other.
In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn't even have a website then.
People choose to read, and it takes effort. It's not one of those hobbies that asks nothing of the person who is doing it. It's more than a hobby.
In the end, the end of a life only matters to friends, family, and other folks you used to know. For everyone else, it's just another end.
Don't start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don't. They'll make you look like chopped liver.
If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.
What makes Gucci Mane Gucci Mane is like what made Frank Sinatra Frank Sinatra - it's just him. He's trap's Frank Sinatra.
Skateboarding was everything to us growing up. It changes the way you see the world: you spend all day looking for ditches.
I've always liked street lights, and I've always photographed them. I probably have a collection of two to three thousand photographs of them, just around the city, mainly at night.
I've just always liked watching people dance. I can't explain it. It used to just make me laugh.
After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.
I suppose when I started out I would have liked to have been the darling of critics or something, but everybody wants to be loved and admired.
You know, Arabs are critical of United States foreign policy, but they also associate the U.S. with democratic principles and opportunity.
I think everybody's had that feeling of sitting in a theater, in a dark room, with other strangers, watching a very powerful film, and they felt that feeling of transformation.
Talking to actors is the same as talking to any other artists; it's getting into the moment for them, and making sure they can lose themselves in the performance!
People can't stand it when you deal with issues of race and class, and also sometimes the church, and you give a perspective that flushes out hypocrisy.
I have to be clear with myself and very conscious of what I am trying to say. Misunderstandings will always take place; it's unavoidable.
I'm not one of these directors, so far, that wants to have a whole separate director's cut of these things. So far they've turned out to be kind of the length that they wanted to be.
When I'm shooting, really the audience I'm thinking the hardest about is that first test screening audience who I want to like the film and that first opening weekend audience.
