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My experience, with both my parents, is that grief has a lot of down, sad things, but I was also really emotionally raw, in the first year after each of them passed. Flowers smelled more intensely, my relationships were hotter, and I was more willing to risk. I was going for it a lot more. I was ‘unsober’ and I wasn’t playing by my rules.
Shooting a film is like a kismet quest. You have thirty days and you need magic to happen. So that’s why I wear suits. I’m praying to the gods, and I’m doing everything I can to respect the powers of the world.
I think I make films to help bolster and feed the part of me that wants to remain in a positive relationship with the world and to engage in it. So hopefully in non-sentimental ways, I’m trying to make something that helps make me happy.
My dad’s gay experiences really had a very positive influence on me and my straight relationships – how to better accept all the weirdness and ambiguity and ups and downs and paradoxes. I knew from the beginning I was writing about love.
There’s some movies I watch, they’re kind of like my anti-anxiety pill, my anti-depressant pill. I watch them at least once or twice a month probably. And I never stop learning from them as a filmmaker.
I guess I watch movies to make myself happier a lot.
OK, so my parents were married in 1955 and my mom knew my dad was gay and my dad knew he was gay and so I was, like, ‘Why in the heck did you get married?’ Like, what was going on? What was that time? It’s like this crazy paradox that my whole life is based on, or my family’s based on. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand ’55.
I think that animals aren’t less intelligent than humans, they’re just of a different intelligence. We have five million smell-sensitive cells in our nose, they have two hundred and fifty million – they can smell emotion. They can smell different types of emotion, they just have another type of intelligence.
To me, sadness and humor aren’t disrelated and humor is the best tool I’ve had against the sadness in my life.
I am intrigued by inanimate objects. They’re a piece of history, someone’s statement and ideas of life.