Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.

Each kid has a different level of expertise and some of them are very raw and inexperienced and some are incredibly mature and experienced. So you just have to go with what they are rather than have some abstract technique that you're going to try to apply to them.

I'm not very well organized unless I'm plugged into a structure like the opera or a movie. When I'm doing that, I have to be organized.

The more unique your film is and unusual it is and difficult it is, the harder it is to get it financed. That's why a lot of good filmmakers are doing television. They do HBO movies.

For me, it's just a normal artistic endeavour to explore the dark side. Certainly, I'm not alone in it. Artists generally don't like to accept the version of reality that society and culture hand them. They want to know what's really going on. So you're always looking in the ceilings, under the floorboards and behind the walls, trying to find the mechanisms, the structures, and the truth. I find that often leads you into some dark places.

My understanding of life is very existential. I think that we are our bodies. There's nothing else, and when we die, that's it. No afterlife.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.