A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.
Baseball is one of the most beautiful games. It is. It is a very Zen-like game.
Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.
Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.
Cricket makes no sense to me. I find it beautiful to watch and I like that they break for tea. That is very cool, but I don't understand. My friends from The Clash tried to explain it years and years ago, but I didn't understand what they were talking about.
Hopefully, if not it's not working right. I'm like a navigator and I try to encourage our collaboration and find the best way that will produce fruit. I like fruit. I like cherries, I like bananas.
I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are.
I always think the Sex Pistols and the Ramones as very, very important because they stripped things down.
I didn't get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.
I didn't get the degree because in my last year, for my thesis film I made a feature called Permanent Vacation and they'd given me a scholarship, the Louis B Mayer fellowship and they made a mistake.
I didn't go to classes there, but ended up at the Cinematheque, and there it opened up even wider because there I saw a variety of films from all over the world.
I didn't have any money and I didn't know what to do with myself, and I applied to graduate film school at NYU.
I don't like American football. I think it's boring and ridiculous and predictable. But baseball is very beautiful. It's played on a diamond.
I have to tell everyone that when I finish a film and it goes out and is released, I never look at my films again. I don't like looking back. I don't even like talking about 'em! So I'm really digging back in my memory because I don't like to sit and look at my films again.
I like doing them and they're ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don't have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They're really fun, I want to make more of them definitely.
I like to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting.
I love rehearsing because in rehearsals there are no mistakes, nothing is wrong, some things apply or lead you to focus on the character and the things that don't apply are equally valuable because they lead you to towards what does.
I start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It's always a real collaboration for me.
I started working with friends of mine and that, to some degree, continues.
I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.
I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.
I think that Dante was hip-hop culture because he wrote in vernacular Italian, and at the time that was unheard of; people wrote in Latin or Petrach wrote in high Italian, and so Dante was talking street stuff.
I wanted to make an Indian character who wasn't either a) the savage that must be eliminated, the force of nature that's blocking the way for industrial progress, or b) the noble innocent that knows all and is another cliche. I wanted him to be a complicated human being.
I was very lucky and eventually showed the film, got some good responses, and some people helped to make the longer version of the film.
I was writing prose poems, but they were starting to echo not film scripts, but descriptions of scenes in a cinematic way.
I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.
I'm not a director who says, "Say your line, hit your mark", that's not my style. I want them to work with me and everyone I choose to collaborate with elevates our work above what I could imagine on my own.
I've always loved films, always. I studied literature and I went to Columbia in New York and I went to Paris for part of one year and ended up staying there.
If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.
If you think about taking a taxi, it's something insignificant in your daily life; in a film when someone takes a taxi, you see them get in, then there's a cut, then you see them get out. So in a way the content of this film is made up of things that would usually be taken out.
In real life, if you're at a table with four people, you don't know which one is going to speak next, it's not scripted in that way, so if you can work with the actor to get to a place where they are confident in their character, then you let their character react to the scene that you're filming.
Instead of sending it to the school for tuition, they sent it directly to me, so I spent it on the budget of the film.
It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things.
Language can be abstracted, language can be used as a very beautiful code in poetry, the nuances and the multiple meanings of things, it has a music to it. It has so many things in it. It is also reduced from prose and therefore can be both mathematical, or very, very abstract.
Laughter is good for your spirit and Oscar Wilde said: "Life is far too important to be taken seriously," which is a quote I really love and I feel that way about the work as well.
Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.
That period was really, really important, because there were a lot of different artists - musicians, film-makers - that had this "make-it-in-the-garage" aesthetic that was really inspiring and really good.
The intention was to shoot short films that can exist as shorts independently, but when I put them all together, there are things that echo through them like the dialogue repeats; the situation is always the same, the way they're shot is very simple and the same.
What I did was I completed the half-hour film, but before really showing it, I wrote two more sections for a potential feature film which I didn't think would really happen, but at least I had it in case.
When I left Ohio when I was 17 and ended up in New York and realised that not all films had the giant crab monsters in them, it really opened up a lot of things for me.
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