I want all of my films to belong to me.

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.

When you're a houseguest and you leave, it's nice to straighten something up or send your hosts a useful gift. And when you leave the planet, it's nice to have made a positive contribution.

The thing is, right now the films don't need to be overtly political to be about our times. We also need films that are just human, that are about people. People need that, too. It's like we need to reconnect to what it is to be human. Not just what our political situation is. That's not what I'm thinking about exclusively. Human content is needed again, as it was in the '70s. I think films were more human than they've been since then.

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.

Joe E. Lewis said, 'Money doesn't buy happiness but it calms the nerves.' And that is how I feel about a film being well-received.

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