We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

Sometimes I feel sad, but this is not nostalgia, because I don't want time to come back.

At that time, when I started, in the '50s, cinema was very classical in its aims.

You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn't need to have muscles.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

I know people could tell incredible stories. People have been in concentration camps, or women being raped, or a man going to war and not recovering from it. People have been robbed and beaten. A lot of people have had strong events in their life, which I didn't.

Humor is such a strong weapon, such a strong answer.