For a director, the most challenging scenes are the dialogue scenes.

There were movies that always made me want to be a director. You see brilliant scenes and the way the emotions were handled. I thought, I'd really like to do that.

On stage, the audience watches from a fixed viewpoint and the director cannot retake something he doesn't like. It has to work straight through.

The number of opera houses around the world and the high attendance rates show that opera an art form that is more popular than ever.

I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

At HBO, they seem to be well-informed. They make what I think are really quite mature films.

Everyone has seen photographs of Mexicans wearing those big sombreros. When you come to Mexico, the astonishing thing is, nobody wears these hats at all.