I think religion is often very different from spirituality. Religion is often about rules and people trying to control our lives who are actually very unspiritual…
I’ve always wanted to introduce hip-hop filmmaking to film. There’s hip-hop art, dance, music, but there really isn’t hip-hop film. So I was trying to do that.
I was 12 or 13 years old. So I started to write poetry and fiction, even though I was really into biology because my dad was a science teacher. I kept writing all those years.
Also expressionistic filmmaking – making the audience feel like they were inside the characters’ heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.
I’m Godless. And so I’ve had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is — ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.
I think there’s something in collaboration – the fact that you can sit there and bounce ideas off of someone. It definitely matters who the person is, because certain people… T
I don’t make films that are easy to market, unfortunately. I think that ‘Pi’ was the easiest one, because we had that symbol to stick up everywhere, so that was a good gimmick, and created a good mystery, and we didn’t have to do huge scale.
I try to live my life where I end up at a point where I have no regrets. So I try to choose the road that I have the most passion on because then you can never really blame yourself for making the wrong choices. You can always say you’re following your passion.
These wrestlers aren’t organized. They have no union, no pension and no insurance. You meet wrestler after wrestler who sold out Madison Square Garden ten years ago, basically running on fumes today. There’s a lot of drama there.
I’ve been joking that if Madonna taught us anything, you’ve got to reinvent yourself. I think it’s important as a filmmaker, as any person working in the arts, that you’ve got to try new stuff and challenge yourself and take chances.
