There is no god. I am an atheist. It is up to us to become God. We need to be elevated, to become saints. God alienates people from themselves.

To retain his dignity, an artist must live in opposition. He must be critical of his country. If not, then he is worthless.

Good and evil are polar concepts - one can't exist without the other.

You can't go further than being naked.

There's a longstanding myth about the United States that is still very prevalent in Europe [despite recent developments]. Historically the "America" of this myth is an incredible human adventure and an experiment in political democracy. But at the same time, or so we're told, it's the land of extremes where the worst can happen.

The United States is such a potent political, cultural, and economic model in the evocation of the contemporary world, that to come here, select some elements from the prototype and rearrange them, that's really interesting artistically.

My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched. It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.