Some documentaries are made by people who are driven more by one particular story, or have different backgrounds or ambitions, but I'm always looking for projects that let me be the best filmmaker I can be, and to be stretched and grow further.

The world of extreme sports is also one of big business. Kids might think that snowboarding is the ultimate freedom, but this freedom is being marketed to them by commercial sponsors.

I love great locations in movies, and I couldn't believe I'd never seen a landfill on screen before. It was the most haunting place.

I love making fiction films as well as nonfiction ones, and hope to keep challenging myself to make better and better work.

Suffering, it turns out, demands profound imagination. A new future has to be conjured up because the old future isn't there anymore.

If you want to devote yourself to the arts, you'd better do it strictly from passion, because there is zero guarantee that you'll get anywhere. The hardest thing is dealing with business people who have nothing to do with your art. They could care less that you're up at 4:30 in the morning writing a joke. Don't expect any sympathy from anybody.

I'm very manipulative towards directors. My theory is that everyone on the set is directing the film, we're all receiving art messages from the universe on how we should do the film.

I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.