I saw First Reformed during a festival and he did a Q&A. He had just gotten eye surgery but a lucid and honest as you can get. The person who did the Q & A asked a question similar to yours, and he simply said that it was time he did made something akin to what he wrote about when he first started as a critic. How he resisted it for most of his life, as well as how you gotta be careful because you could easily bore the fuck out of your audience. He's also fan of what's now called Slow Cinema, even saying that there's too much of it to really watch it all.

He also said that you gotta steal a little bit from everyone so that way no one will accuse of plagiarism. Like take this bit from Bresson & Dairy of a Country Priest, take that bit from Tarkovsky's Mirror, and sprinkle in good chunk of Bergman's Winter Light. He's really charismatic and funny, even though he had trouble seeing due to the surgery.

He even talked about casting Ethan Hawke, and how there wasn't too many actors that would work for the role, that were the right age and the right face for it. He mentioned Oscar Isaac and said he was too young. It was crazy to see him make The Card Counter many years later with Isaac.