I didn't go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom.

I'm still fighting. I don't know how much longer, but I'm still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film.

It's interesting work for me to tell my life, as a possibility for other people to relate it to themselves - not so much to learn about me.

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.

I think I did fifteen long features and fifteen documentaries, or something like this, which is very little when you think of people making a film every year. Some people have done fifty or sixty films.

I didn't go to film school. I was never an assistant or trainee on a film. I had not seen all those cameras. So I think it gave me a lot of freedom.

If I was tall and blonde, I might have been a dancer or singer.