Directing, I get all kinds of inspiration. It's working with people. It's a lot more fun.

If it was a choice between making movies and doing nothing, he'd probably still wish me to make movies, So he made me keep going.

A lot of people will think I changed the book: ‘so you’re the tiger instead, you’re the tiger who ate the cook.’ That’d be totally expository, like in the book, ‘you’re the tiger’ and then it stops there. That seems to have the magic touch. I bring everything together. That’s why he made up the story, the whole thing becomes internalized. That might be the magic, but all I did is not so much interpreted, but try my best to keep everybody still staying in the movie. And I was like, ‘God, it’s so hard to do.’ I make movies for a long time. It doesn't get easier.

The most mysterious feminine factor, the existence that we men, we don't know. It's woman. It's feminine. That's what the sword is about. That's the symbolic meaning of the sword.

Americans are hidden dragons to me.

Sometimes films ignore other points of view because it's simpler to tell the story that way, but the more genuine and sympathetic you are to different points of view and situations, the more real the story is.

When I sent those scripts, that was the lowest point of my life. We'd just had our second son, and when I went to collect them from hospital, I went to the bank to try and get some money to buy some diapers, the screen showed I've got $26 left.