That's in the mission statement when you're part of 'Trek.' It's our job to try to be bold and push forward. You have to be conscious of that.

I get to make movies; I get to do what I love.

We make movies and we all try our best and sometimes we connect with the audience, sometimes we don't.

There was something so pure about 'Better Luck Tomorrow' because money wasn't the currency. It was passion. The fact we were trying to do something even though no one was asking us to. It meant a lot.

If I make a film like 'Better Luck Tomorrow' or 'Finishing the Game,' I'll protect it with everything I have.

After I made 'Better Luck Tomorrow' and started taking meetings in Hollywood, I quickly learned that Asian Americans weren't even in the conversation as a minority, since there wasn't even a significant enough audience, and especially an audience for Asian American content.

For the longest time, the Asian-American community would talk about representation, but I think it's also about the freedom to really shape, create, and explore issues that are important to us, regardless of whether it's positive or negative, as long as it's three dimensional.

I do all these panels where people are always talking about the lack of female directors, and I have a lot of opinions on that.

Actors have their own processes, and if you want to be respectful of their process, you've got to communicate with them in the language of their process, and keeping that all straight is a little bit of a head-scratcher.

I don't like villains who are just villains. People who are just there to be bad - ugh - so annoying.

You're supposed to be writing from experience - experience with people, with reading, seeing some homeless guy on the street and making up some story of him in your head. If you never see any of that or have those conversations or even sleep enough to have vivid dreams, then what are you writing about?

I grew up as an avid reader. I would go to the library and check out 40 books a week. Some of them were smarty books; most of them were 'Sweet Valley High' and young teen romance.

Don't do another show just because someone thinks that there's a dollar to be earned there. Do it because you love the characters, and you love the world, and you really, truly feel both the fans and you as a storyteller can benefit from having the second show.

In a non-supernatural universe, there's just character, and it's humanity and human beings and how they relate to each other.

There's something about a supernatural universe that you would think would actually make it easier to create tension and build conflict and have big scares and big ideas and big sequences. And that's true in a lot of ways. You can pick the best idea out of a hat.

When you're the showrunner, you're the person that's in control of most of the details, and to be able to take all that and then to step right behind the camera and to have a direct line of communication with the crew and with the actors - to not be delivering that through another person - is pretty freeing and extremely stimulating.

What's funny is, I was always certain that I couldn't be a director because there are things about the physics of camera and lighting that I fundamentally cannot wrap my head around.

There's something about two people coming together in the rain that is the ultimate expression of love in the minds of most audiences, I guess.

The people I worked for before I was doing 'Vampire Diaries' were very generous to me.

The joke of being a showrunner is that people ask how you get it all done, and you don't. The list of things I don't get done in a given day is longer than the list of things I do. And one of the things that's first to go is watching dailies.

I remember just weeping my way through the 'Friday Night Lights' finale with my best friend and just being so happy all the way through because it was so beautiful.

It was a high-class problem burden, but it was still a burden on 'The Vampire Diaries,' in which we had this group of characters that we loved writing for so much and who had so much available story to tell.

It took me some time to realize television, for someone like me, was the perfect medium. I like to produce, I like to be detail-orientated, I like to be in charge of a lot of things, and I like to be a storyteller. It's kind of the perfect gig for someone like me.

I've always been a super-fan of television storytelling. It took me a while to figure that out in a career capacity, but certainly in a life capacity, I've been an avid viewer of television for decades.