A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you. So it does sometimes turn into a situation where you're saying to the person you're working with, "Well, what do you want?" But then there are other times when I work with people and they'll turn to me and say, "How do you want to do this?" And that's actually when I work best.
I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level.
People are sort of numb to watching violence, but sexual activity is still as strong as it ever was in terms of generating response.
I don't have any kind of ideology that precludes me from moving in one direction or another. I just want creative autonomy and I want at least an opportunity that it's going to be seen.
If you're a painter and you want people to know who you are and recognize your work, you've got to build some long-term value.
You should never assume anything coming from a critical standpoint. You should go into everything assuming you're going to get crushed.
Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it.
I was thinking that people have to believe you're crazy in order to take you seriously as an artist. If you're wandering the streets, talking in gibberish, nobody ever asks you to change anything about your art because there's no context for people to look at what you do.
I guess I didn't feel confident enough to be searching in a big public way. I was very content at the time to toil in obscurity on things that I thought might point me in certain directions or teach me certain things - not knowing what that would be.
American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.
I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don't. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing what I do. But I find it pleasurable.
I think often people fall into the breadth trap of wanting to do too long a period of time, and obviously there's this sort of algorithm of how much depth you can put into something times how much of their life you're trying to show. My attitude has always been, I'd rather show a briefer period of time in more detail than a longer period of time in less detail.
Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film.
Well, it's 15 years since Sex, Lies And Videotape, and if you hang around long enough you're having the same arguments with just a new set of people every few years and it gets boring.
When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.
You can't change who you are, so I think that the only thing you can do is just never talk to people about stuff and then hope that maybe does something.
Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but thats not reality, its just another aesthetic form of fiction.
But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.
The great thing about the business is how Darwinian it is. We have to swim or die - if you are found wanting over a period of time, you've either got to change what you're doing or find something else to do.
I think the feeling that we're going to work together again usually starts to come up before the first project's even done. The Black Keys and I have already talked about starting on something new.
In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides.
Traffic is about drugs. As detailed a portrait as I can muster about what is happening in the drug world, from top to bottom, from policy to how things move on the street.
I just produced Criminal, this remake of Nine Queens, and one of the things that appealed to me about Nine Queens is that it was a performance piece, and that's the most fun.
It's pretty clear to me that working as a director for hire agrees with me. I like it. The films that have come out of that, I personally like better than the ones that didn't.
I find myself in situations a lot where I have to say to someone, "This can be better," and it's hard to say that.
