You know every time you change a decade, it's a problem, because you approach the end little by little. But my decision is to keep going. The problem is always to know when the head doesn't work well. Someone has to tell you. I hope my children will tell me.

The assistants in France are not like they are in the States. Assistants are much more close to the film directors, and they used to have a kind of very artistic task. They used to do the casting, scouting, and so forth.

I initially studied literature [in France], and then I went to cinema school. I discovered the Cinematheque, and saw not only action movies and westerns, but also lots of serious movies.

My life in Greece influenced what I am. My father was in the left because he was against the king and his family, who had created a war against the Turks at the beginning of the last century to revive the Byzantine Empire. For three years, there was fighting, and all my father's friends died. So he hated the royal family.

I decided to go to the cinema school because I thought it was a new sort of media. Nowadays, it's not anymore, but in the '50s, cinema had a half century of age. Today it's more than one century. I thought it was a new media, a new way of telling stories.

In the U.S. more than any other place, the banking system is insane. Millions of Americans lost their houses. Because of what? Because of the banking system. This American banking system is also coming to Europe. We can say today that the banks and high financiers run the world.

Every time you have a crisis in a country you have an extreme wing coming up and proposing solutions. The way to fight them is by doing lots of work teaching people that every time these fascist systems gained power they ended up with big tragedies - lots of blood, lots of police, and lots of misery.