There's no choice left in America anymore. Anything that's authentic and genuine, anything that grew out of any sense of tradition, is wiped out. We're left with this bland monoculture that's swept over the whole country.

Saying that all documentaries are the same is like saying all foreign films are the same.

Because I found myself telling the story of his family to people without the visual aids that I was able to employ by filming them eventually. But I very much knew exactly what I was going to do.

And - but when you're making a film on somebody, you really have to check with them, and plan, and hire the cinematographer to come out.

The films I want to make, I really want to be passionate about.

The first scene I ever shot for 'Louie Bluie,' on that first day, I had never seen the camera before. I didn't know where to put it. I just knew what was strong about these guys and what I wanted to capture, so I tried to work backward from there and figure it out. Trial and error. Hopefully I got a little bit better at it.

And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.

The main trouble with Hollywood is that the guys you have to pitch to, the guys who run the studios, are all business school grads.

If I see my films described as 'quirky' or, even worse, 'snarky' one more time, I'm going to probably seriously consider an early retirement. All these years, I've labored under the conceit that they were "darkly humorous.'

If I start paying attention to the mechanics of a film while watching it, then it's generally a bad film.