“The camera is interested in what you are thinking as opposed to just what you are doing or saying.”

They didn’t really have a choice because I got jobs acting before anyone could really say anything.

I applied to American Repertory School up at Harvard at got in.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects.

Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing.

I love films for the fact that it is like working under a microscope. It is sort of like a laboratory.

I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.

I had been working early in my life in films – since I was 11.

In every character I play, I try to imbibe something. Every film is a learning process for me.

I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful.

There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold.

I want to present interesting stories that don’t qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

America makes up its own mind about what it wants to see.

I hear music as narrative.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

I try to preserve the dynamics of the street, and my way of using the camera tries to approximate as much as possible the way we see: focusing on details, opening up to wider angles, and composing all these very short, fragmented impressions into a larger mental picture.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.