A lot of people get stuck, like, "Oh, if it's made by a studio, it can't be independent." Often they link it to the source of financing, or how it's distributed, but I don't really know how you can. A filmmaker will take his money from anywhere. It doesn't matter.

I like to think of film-making not just as an act of personal self-aggrandisement but rather as an act of public service.

I always wanted 'Sideways' to be like a great 1960s Italian film.

This is how good movies get made and always have: from the gut instinct of the financiers, not just by committee and research.

There is an audience out there for literate films - slower, more observant, more human films, and they deserve to be made.

I love comedies. I take comedy very seriously as a form. It's a serious form, involving a certain way of looking at life, specifically the painful aspects of life. I get asked, "How can you have such failures in your films?" Well, what else is life about? There's some sense of constant failure in something. Humor gives you a distance from it.

Marketing has supplanted story as the primary force behind the worthiness of making a film, and that's a very sad thing. It's film only as a function of consumerism rather than as an important component of our culture, and that's everywhere around the world.