Were you ever surprised, looking at White Girl, that young people are still acting this way?

“No, of course not! That’s part of the reason why when [my colleagues] came to me and said, ‘This is it,' I totally recognized what they were responding to.”

How do you think Kids has aged?

“I do find that when I speak at college campuses — which I do a lot — I often ask people if they’ve seen this movie or that movie of ours. For a long time, people hadn’t seen Kids. In the past few years, it’s become, for whatever reason, rediscovered. Suddenly I’ve found that many people have seen it. Young people, especially. They feel that it’s very relatable. I also think they feel, sometimes, a nostalgia. It was sort of the last grasp at an authentic film about youth with no social media whatsoever. It was almost like the last time you could do that.”

Wow. There’s not a lot of social media in White Girl.

“Right, but there are cell phones. It feels of this time. When we were shooting Kids, we gave all the kids beepers so that we could keep track of them. I remember constantly beeping the kids to tell them when they had to be on set, et cetera.”

Was there a sense on the set of Kids that you were all making a movie that was going to turn into something so important? And so cool?

“There never is that sense. I think if you knew that, then you could make sure you only made movies like that. And then I’d be a billionaire instead of a working stiff.

"When we were making Kids, it was pragmatic: It was the same as any other movie. We had this amount of script to shoot, this amount of days to do it in, this actor’s unavailable on this day… How are we going to make it all work? It was a very typical question of how do we fit our ambitions into a box but still make something extraordinary."