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Teenagers, especially girl ones, seem like the perfect canary-in-the-coal-mine characters to me. They capture American culture and its perversion, its hypocrisy - how absorbed we are with youth and beauty and sexualized imagery, for instance, while preaching abstinence and modesty.

Teens find out a lot from other teens.

Every teenager deals in his or her own sexuality and has to face it and figure out how it can coincide with the rest of their lives in a healthy manner. And try to navigate it in our modern society, which is wrought with stigma and taboo and repression, and sort of as a result, these inner monsters that some teenagers really struggle with.

Teenagers have a natural curiosity and are keen to clock up experiences. What they need to be wary of is that some experiences may erode their sense of self and lead to a fragmentation of morals.

Teenagers are very dark, I think. That's all the goth and emo stuff. They're experiencing a lot of stuff that adults experience, but in a much more raw way. It's that extremity that I'm interested in, to be able to go down so far and come up so quickly.

I think every teenager feels like a Martian in something, whether it's in their family, I think, or in their school. I think every teenager, every human being has a sense that they don't belong somewhere.

Teens are the target demographic for everything in pop culture.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender teens are bullied and ostracized in epidemic proportions. It's disgusting, and it must change.

Adolescents are not monsters. They are just people trying to learn how to make it among the adults in the world, who are probably not so sure themselves.

Teens are not like the weird, dumb dwarves you have around your house. They are actually you when you were younger.