I prefer the countryside to cities. This is also true of my films: I have made more films in rural societies, and villages, than in towns.

Anything I've not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it.

A work of art doesn't exist outside the perception of the audience.

Cinema seats make people lazy. They expect to be given all the information. But for me, question marks are the punctuation of life.

I wasn't searching for a common denominator - I started wondering about the challenge of working in other cultures. What I reached was the sudden acknowledgment of the universal aspect of filmmaking.

All the different nations in the world, despite their differences of appearance and religion and language and way of life, still have one thing in common, and that is what's inside of all of us. If we X-rayed the insides of different human beings, we wouldn't be able to tell from those X-rays what the person's language or background or race is.

What I am trying to say is that it is not without any value. The value of copies is that they can direct us towards the original. I was recently at the Louvre Museum and I was filming people who were viewing the Mona Lisa. I noticed the number of ordinary people, astonished, mouths agape, standing still for long stretches looking at the work, and I wondered, "Where does this come from? Are these people all art connoisseurs?" They are like me; through the years, we've seen this work in our schoolbooks or art history books, but when we stand before the original, we hold our breath.