What made you want to be a filmmaker?

I was the youngest of five kids, and my mother gave me a video camera to film our vacations. When I looked through the lens, it was like a new world.

When I showed my parents the videos, they started to cry. They were like, “This is the American Dream, to see our family like a normalized family on TV.” I was like, “This is powerful.”

What kinds of movies did you want to make as a kid in the 1980s and ’90s?

We grew up watching a lot of musicals: Singin’ in the Rain, The Sound of Music, and The Wizard of Oz. I loved that [Oz] was about dreams. My parents talked about the American Dream all the time. They came from overseas and started a restaurant. They believed in dreams.

In the ’80s and ’90s there was a fantastical escapism in cinema: E.T., Back to the Future, Hook, Batman, Edward Scissorhands. They were like watching magic. I wanted to make magic.

What is your creative process?

Every movie is like walking into the woods and discovering some new part of me—so I try to find the scariest woods that I don’t know the way out of.

Once I’m in the woods, it’s a big collaborative process. When I gather the team, rather than tell them what to do, I give them the story’s emotions. I say, “You design a costume that makes us feel yearning,” or “You design a set that will make us feel claustrophobia.”

At some point, the movie starts to speak back to us. As everyone’s collaborating, it becomes something different, and that’s where the magic happens.

How do you pursue the extraordinary in your life and work?

I find the extraordinary in the original dreams of my parents. I now have four kids—with a fifth on the way. I pursue the extraordinary by telling them the story of America, so that when they grow older, they have a vision of what the world should and can be.