For so much of my young life, I'd felt lonely, isolated, cut off from like-minded people. I yearned for human connections and relationships with the sort of people I knew only from books and movies, a lifeline into some other, richer world.

In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats - maybe it's imperative that we encounter the defeats - but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike.

Having watched 'The Lone Ranger,' I asked my dad, 'You think we can be on TV like that guy?' He said, 'Probably not. You have to be 6 feet and blond to work in TV and movies.' I said, 'But what about that guy? Jay Silverheels?'

I like 'Reanimator,' and I like 'Evil Dead 2.' But I really like the Corman movies from the late '60s and early '70s, and my favorite is 'The Mask of Red Death' with Vincent Price because - spoiler alert - but at the end of the movie, Vincent Price, he's the evil prince, and to kill him, his court just, like, dances at him.

I'm not a fan of horror movies at all, I'm a real wuss when it comes to the genre and I think 'The Woman' would totally scare me if I hadn't been working on it.

I have not grown up on movies. I didn't watch much films in my childhood, but I was fond of animation films.

There are a lot of parallels between doing a sequel and doing low budget movies, which is they give creative parameters. As a creative person myself, I work better with parameters as opposed to anything goes.

I make movies on gritty topics like crime, the underworld, and horror. I don't make movies with good-looking people in good-looking locales.

Why is the world that I see around me mixed, and why is the world I see in movies filled with all white people? Why does it have to be like that?

It costs a lot of money to release a movie. What you'd call art-house movies - movies that don't have big stars or big budgets - they're very hard for distributors to get behind 'em and take chances.

I've managed to do movies and still keep a lifestyle where I can go to ballgames, go to a grocery store like everybody else.

I've always hated superheroes. I cannot stand them. I love Norse mythology, but I hate superheroes. They ruined movies, then comics, and now games.

If you're a film studio, you're making a movie for a foreign market. You're pursuing ideas that travel well. It changes the movies we see and how movies are made.