[Cautionary verse] is a genre that has receded from view in recent years, but it’s hiding in the shadows, ready to pop out and horrify the stultified masses. Yet it will likely delight anyone who believes that children’s literature should be more than just morality tales dressed up with colorful pictures. Perhaps poems like these can help embolden the humorists of tomorrow. The way things are going, we’re likely to need them.

All my films are somewhat experimental, they are all, each one, taking a certain amount of risk, but there's always the basic assumption that we should be able to appreciate the cinema as much with the mind as we can through emotional empathy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I think it’s important for anyone who takes cinema seriously not to limit yourself to just optimistic or happy movies. I think that’s a problem. You’ve got to be willing to let the art of cinema take you into some darker places if you’re going to make full use of it. There are some people who shouldn’t watch horror films, and I’m all right with that. It’s not about putting something evil in the world. It’s about reckoning with evil. We don’t need any more evil in the world. We need a lot more reckoning with it.

Even the characters I create, they aren't clear-cut supervillains or superheroes, they're all residing in the grey area. Maybe that's why a certain amount of optimism or pessimism mixes into my films. I do feel, however, that's more realistic and more reflective of how society is, and how life is. If everything is clear-cut and residing in one direction, it might feel a bit forced.

Horror movies have been in some way or another doing the same thing for hundreds of years: don't go down to the basement, don’t talk to that stranger, don’t have sex, don’t be a jerk to others. They’re all cautionary tales in one way or another, so the trick these days is getting an audience to invest in your story. If they're not invested in it, you’re just showing them another dark corridor with something that goes “bang” to try and scare them.

I don't think there is any difference between fantasy and reality in the way these should be approached in a film. Of course if you live that way you are clinically insane.

I have to be cautious, but caution also has its own adventure.

My films are therapy for my debilitating depression. In institutions people weave baskets. I make films.

I like films that make me take risks, by which I mean in some way your photographic personality leaves a mark on it. On big films some of this spirit is diluted a little, you have little or no idea what will happen to the film after the final edit.

Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake

People say my films are dark. But like lightness, darkness stems from a reflection of the world. The thing is, I get these ideas that I truly fall in love with. And a good movie idea is often like a girl you're in love with, but you know she's not the kind of girl you bring home to your parents, because they sometimes hold some dark and troubling things.

visionary fiction is not utopian; it's realistic and it's hard, because that's the world we live in, but ultimately it's hopeful. I think that Octavia Butler's work is really an amazing example of that, because at the end of her stories—where these worlds are terrifying—there is hope. There's hope that we can build new worlds that embody justice, that embody new ideas of community, if we follow and keep to a certain set of principles and values and ideals.

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.

Of course, people are more affected by actors or acting. But as a filmmaker, I need some logic. And this was my logic in making these two films, and how I connected these stories and these films together. People say my films don’t have any plot or storyline, but in my logic there is a storyline.