I never seek controversy or foresee it for my pictures. I take a personal stand, and perhaps because my films are on contemporary subjects, people do not share my point of view.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The films that I do tend to polarise people's views.
Anytime you put a movie out it's subject to such scrutiny and such criticism.
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 think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.
As soon as anybody puts anything on film, it automatically has a point of view, and it's somebody else's point of view, and it's impossible for it to be yours.
My films are very rooted in specific people's point of view. Some film-makers give a more global point of view, like God looking down at the characters.
Dividing everybody into genders and sexuality and races and religions, and I think it's important to have films out there, to have discussions out there which really try to get to grips with where that kind of thing can lead.
Lots of people have criticized my movies, but nobody has ever identified the real problem: I'm a sloppy filmmaker.
The culture of independent film criticism has totally gone down the drain and this seems to come with the territory of the consumer age that we are now living in.
I think the point of art is to be controversial in a lot of ways. It's to cause conversations, and it's to get people excited about and talking about the things that the films are about.