Biography

July 14, 1984 · Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA

[on his cinematic inspirations for Queen of Earth (2015)] All this came together during a Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. I went to a double bill of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) and Martha (1974). I knew that was the kind of movie I wanted to make. From there, it became this fun little maze of what other kind of movies you can fold into this - you can take a very sad, emotional drama and find yourself talking about a cheap horror movie like Carnival of Souls (1962) and realizing it's more connected to those other films than they seem. The common thread here is these really interesting women stories - these unique, threatening and occasionally frightening stories about the troubles of broken women. That's the driving force behind almost all of Fassbinder's films. So immersing in a retrospective gives you time to marinate in this theme of women under extreme duress. But then you look at "Carnival of Souls", or Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965), and it takes the form of exaggerated gothic horror. Then you look at Robert Altman's Images (1972), which straddles both lines and becomes a fascinating text of its own. In his body of work, at the time of that film and now, that one sort of sticks out as this quasi-horror experiment. Then I was also thinking of Woody Allen's Interiors (1978), which is as quiet a drama as you can have. I wanted this movie to live in this cinematic world of broken women.

[on Kodak's new Super 8 camera] Kodak's commitment to keeping film alive, not only as a medium for commercial cinema but also by supporting 16mm and Super 8mm for artists and independent filmmakers is, in a word, remarkable. When I hear about the titans of the industry fighting for film, the conversation is always about 35 or even 65mm. Knowing that the precious little 8mm and 16mm siblings are safe as well give me great comfort, as I know that the formats I rely on to make my films will continue to exist. [2016]