I have a feeling that intuition plays a big role in the way you work on your movies. Is it true? Does meditation help develop it?

Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution—seeing it, knowing it. It’s emotion and intellect going together. That’s essential for the filmmaker.

How do you get something to feel

With your practice of Transcendental Meditation I’ve heard you mention the word “enlightenment.” How did you get interested in it?

When I first saw pictures in books of yogis sitting cross-legged in the woods in the forests of India, something would make me look twice. I’d notice their faces. And it wasn’t the face of a man wasting time. It was the face of a man holding something that I not only

At some point in my life, much like you, I decided to become an artist, a painter. I work very slowly; it takes really long time for my ideas to become paintings. I can’t make a living this way, so I have a day job and paint in my free time. I often feel that life passes me by, and I lose hope of ever getting my art really known to people. Did anything like that ever happen to you and how did you

I started doing drugs in college and I feel that they help me cope with the stress of my everyday life, and even seem to increase my creativity. I am aware that they do damage to my body, and I intend to quit eventually, but my life is pretty stressful, and I keep coming back to drugs to just unwind. Do you have any experience with drugs? Can meditation replace them or help quit?

We all want

I get plenty of ideas that I like but I find it difficult to translate them into something practical. Does meditation help you translate your ideas into art?

To me, every film, every project, is an experiment. How do you translate this idea? How do you translate it so that it goes from an idea to a film or to a chair? You’ve got this idea, and you can see it and hear it and feel it and know it.