My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay m...

If you don't have the story and the unfolding of the trajectory of the saga, it's like getting in a car and not having any gas.

Even when you're making a movie about life, death is a presence, and I guess it's part of my dramatic viewpoint. I'm not sure why exactly. Maybe I'm drawn to it as a story element.

Death Valley is really wide-open - it's bigger than Rhode Island - and it's less a part of California than an ungoverned territory, so there's lots of weird cops-and-robbers stuff going on.

I wanted to be a teacher. I love children, so I wanted to deal with children. Then I wanted to be a veterinarian. But by the age of ten or eleven, when I opened my mouth and said, 'Oh, God, what's this?' I kind of knew teaching and being a veterinarian were gonna have to wait.

It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn't really know how to successfully get me going.

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.