Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite.

For me, listening to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in particular, there's an emotional aspect - very different kinds of emotional aspects from those two composers, nonetheless, very strong emotional aspects from both of those composers.

Eccentric doesn't bother me. 'Eccentric' being a poetic interpretation of a mathematical term meaning something that doesn't follow the lines - that's okay.

I started out as an actor but now I act to fund my own productions. I've managed to separate my mindset.

I like to eat and the only thing I've ever been addicted to in my life is sugar.

The United States has its own propaganda, but it's very effective because people don't realize that it's propaganda. And it's subtle, but it's actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it's funded in a different way.

When I started acting in the film industry when I was 16 years old, in 1980, I was going to all the revival theaters in Los Angeles. They were playing mostly films from the '60s and '70s, some from the early '20s and '30s, before that Hays commission. Those films did question things a lot, and there definitely was a switch in 1934. You can see very distinctly in 1934, it's harder to understand what the real culture was. Films made before 1934, you can really kind of see the racism, sexism, drug use, etc. that was going on at that time. And then it was all stopped.