I start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It’s always a real collaboration for me.

When I’m trying to imagine something, I have a few elements, a few ideas, maybe a certain actor or actress I want to create a certain type of character for, or maybe a certain place.

It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn’t have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things.

I have to tell everyone that when I finish a film and it goes out and is released, I never look at my films again. I don’t like looking back. I don’t even like talking about ’em! So I’m really digging back in my memory because I don’t like to sit and look at my films again.

I’d wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.

A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren’t in it for the money. William Blake – only his first book was legitimately published.

I’ve always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there.

Specific music starts feeding my imagination and gives me a landscape that corresponds somehow, in some abstract way, to the world I’m just starting to imagine.

Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal – a small newspaper.

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you’ll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.