I never wanted money worries to slow me down or make me take a job I didn't want.

Cinema really lends itself well to big, archetypal stories, you know, classic old stories and you need kind of a weird, big terrain like the Japanese plains for Samurai movies or the West. You need that for these giants to walk around.

A book is a book, but a movie is a movie. The more faithful you are, the more you'll come up with Harry Potter #1 and #2, which are like filmed books on tape. They're so petrified of turning off the readers that they make no concessions to the fact that they're trying to make a piece of cinema.

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 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.

As the years go by and I make more films, I am increasingly interested in capturing place as a vivid backdrop for my films.

I don't want all of American cinema to be big cartoons that are just made to be digested by the entire world.