Perhaps the most difficult thing is shooting scenes set 6,000 feet up in the mountains of Mexico.

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.

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.

I don't rehearse films as much as opera or theatre. When I began directing films I thought a long rehearsal was a good idea. Experience showed me that the best performance was often left in a rehearsal room.

When we were trying to get the money together for the film, one reason that was consistently given for not investing in it was that everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen.

When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.

I thought, This is fabulous. It sent shivers up my spine. I thought, What kinds of people are these that would produce this kind of music in a camp? All the prison camp stories I've seen, and heard of, were about the heroism of men. As I researched this and heard the music, I realized that women were heroic too, on just as grand a scale. And their treatment was just as appalling.