Of course, there's always one theater that shows some kind of European film. Now, fortunately, you have DVDs, so it's possible to get anything you want within a few hours. In those days, it was virtually impossible to get Italian films, or German films, or whatever. So I grew up with very standard, mainstream films.

I respect BMW for not interfering in these projects. They're just trying to support short films with their brand, which I think is great.

I don't have anything against commercials, and I really like BMWs.

In the creative process, my ego has always been a huge tyrant ... a dictator and kind of rude and very misleading, because sometimes when I'm doing something, I say, "This is great! This is fantastic! Very genius!" And 20 minutes later, I feel like a dead jellyfish. "You are a stupid a**hole. This is a piece of sh*t. Nobody will care about it."

All my films have always been released in the autumn, maybe because they're more melancholy to people.

I was aware of the possible biases you could get as a commercial director, like being too concerned about the technical aspects of the form rather than anything of substance. If you keep working in commercials, you can get trapped in a very superficial way of thinking. I always used commercials as an exercise for filmmaking, like going to the gym.

In the United States there's not a lot of people interested in foreign language films. Every time, it's more difficult for foreign language films to survive here.