I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.

I think it was [Jean-Luc] Godard who said that life is nothing but a bad copy of film, but then our ambition must be to make better films and better shapes of forms that are given in life.

A digital camera does have many advantages and I was a believer that digital video would be a big influence on film-making.

This [the earthquake] was a very big influence on me, and the issue of life and death from then on does recur in my films.

I only make notes, I don't write dialogues in full. And the notes are very much based on my knowledge of person.

When we start shooting I don't have rehearsals with characters at all. So, rather than pulling them towards myself, I travel closer to them; it's very much closer to the real person than anything I try to create. So I give them something but I also take from them.

We are nothing but a link between our culture and what we can actually produce.