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When you make a film, you like to run it with an audience. They tell you you're narrow-minded or subjective, or that seems too long, or that doesn't work.

You have to make films you feel strongly about. And then hope you can find the audience.

One can never anticipate how audiences will respond. One of the lessons that I've learned over the years is to that no matter what my feeling or opinion might be about a given film, once you give it to the audience, they own it.

I always felt there was a kind of humanistic impulse in my thinking about film as well as a real interest in its formal and aesthetic properties - just this idea that it can bring you into a very intimate encounter with people.

When you ask a bunch of people to see a film, and then invite them to comment on it and tell them it's a work-in-progress, they feel bound to offer an opinion.

I can't comment on any outside perception. I'm happy to come out and talk about movies that I've worked on in a setting like this. Otherwise, I have my own life that I live which is very different and private.

When I got to filmmaking, the most democratic of environments where anybody could say anything, those were the best environments, but what you don't want to assume is that you know what the audience is thinking.

The more you can create a structure by which people live in a fantastical situation and by which they will act, and the more you lay that out for the audience, the more they will feel at home in it.

The worst thing you can do to a filmmaker is to walk out of his film and go, 'That was a nice movie.' But if you can cause people to walk out and then argue about the film on the sidewalk... I think we're all seeking dissension, and we love to affect an audience.

That's the power of film. If it's good, it can somehow make you feel connected to even the farthest thing from your own experience.