Biography

The assumption that I was going to get into film by people I didn't know kind of put me off. When I was 24 I decided that was maybe not a good reason to avoid doing something that was interesting to me. So I enrolled in a film school at Ryerson.

[on including a picture of Marilyn Monroe on the 2012 Cannes Film Festival poster] A celebrity is a cultural construct that's unrelated to the human being, and continues to exist independent of the life and death of the human being. It's kind of ironic, but at the same time what better place to have a discussion about celebrity?

[on becoming a filmmaker] Film is an interesting art form: it collects all those elements - visual elements, music elements, writing elements. It seemed like a good way to focus all that scattered energy into one thing.

I think that celebrity mania is sort of an older, broader human thing - if you look at at the deification of the saints and people elevated almost to the status of gods, repeated iconography, physical fetishism: you know, that desire for the finger bone of a particular saint, the relics. I don't think the problem is new and that we should all get hysterical about it, but I do think the mania that drives that industry is extremely unhealthy because it represents a loss of perspective.

[on his father's work] I didn't see his films until later in life. Growing up around them and around him, I think I've been mostly too close to them to be influenced in the usual way...My earliest memory of any of his sets was going onto the set of The Fly (1986) at one point.