All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That's what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.

Every film is hard to fund.

Fighting bitterness can be a full-time job.

Movies are romantic fantasies.

So there’s a choice that I made to tell stories that are still psychological melodramas about domestic issues. The challenge is to figure out how to make 10 films a career as a filmmaker, and that’s a really challenging thing.

I tend not to think that anything I happen to be reporting on in my films is special. Meaning that people are always saying to me, 'you must love New York, you have it in all your films.' But mostly it's because I know New York, and I know Brooklyn at this time. I know the lives there, because I have lived in them.

When working on and writing a film, I'm often more of a sponge than other times, aware of what's going on around me.

To come to change, there had to be conflict and pain.

My early films were about self discovery, and films of internal conflict. At that level, they were very personal.

I do love the young adult novels as a form and genre, because it has a purity of intention and heart.