Emerging actors know there's a whole lot to learn each time they are spending with someone who's done a lot.

#TimesUp is you can't hold it in anymore: Time's up! The doors have to give way. It can't be that every 27-year-old born into a male body is a designated genius. It can't be that the language used to review male and female films is different.

American film isn't just film and glamor and fame and the lives of people who are fortunate financially. Those aren't the only stories in this vast nation. That's my mandate.

Sometimes you get ensnared by an idea, and it's what I call 'the sticky burr': You go hiking, and a burr sticks to you, and that's the film you're going to make.

When I find those actors who are going to work that hard and collaborate that deeply, my role is to make sure there's a whole lot there for them to work with.

Every filmmaker has this short book of films that don't get made - for a whole host of reasons.

My producing partner and I were shown a novel we really liked. It was called 'My Abandonment' by Peter Rock, and we enjoyed reading it.

I find it so hard to make films about my own region, but it could happen.

I'm from the East Coast, and so therefore, the Pacific Northwest forest is very exotic land to me.

I love to champion some of the hardworking actors where, it's been said to me, they don't bring money. But to me, they bring everything. They bring their wonderful selves.

Some of the subject matters that I like to make stories about are definitely not inherently commercial. So I have to look for a very special kind of financing and go down a very gentle path in order to make my films, as do basically all social-realist filmmakers. It's a long process.

I have, obviously, a very complex relationship with the more industrial side of filmmaking and the machinery that can take an actor or an actress and create something so bamboozling and monumental and fathomless in terms of publicity hits.

I don't want to make fictional characters who are perfect - that's a vanilla situation - but the fact is you are allowed to more carefully select and curate what it is you're going to explore.

In documentary, you are sometimes burdened, or you feel very responsible for dealing with - I want to say - more complicated themes. Fiction allows for greater distillation.

In documentary, mostly, people are going to say untoward things; people are going to have gnarly beliefs. People aren't perfect.

You can't just pill away injuries that go deep in someone. They don't just stop those feelings from existing.

I like to make films about how people survive living in the United States.

Time's up on cheesy, lesser, boring roles for females in the stories that we try to tell.

Festivals are where I see other peoples' films, where we talk, where I get to learn what was working about the film, I get to have a discussion with viewers... and people who enjoy reading films - I enjoy reading other peoples' films, and what discussions can come of that.

I think one thing that's always a concern to me is you see a role, and you're not seeing the character; you're seeing so-and-so do it. Then I'm taken out of the story considerably, personally.

No one has a green light when they start a documentary - not ever.

For whole swaths of people, that map of, 'Come along this way, come to college, do this and that,' isn't offered.

We need cultural awareness and a cooperative approach with other countries versus a dominating approach.

When I'm interested in an aspect of someone's life, I want to ask about their experiences, their survival strategies, and what they do to keep their lives interesting.