I like darkness and confusion and absurdity, but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out into a safe life area of happiness.

Consciousness-Based Education is education that is in most ways exactly like regular education, but with the added technique of Transcendental Meditation. Transcendental Meditation, or TM as it's often referred to, allows students to dive in and experience the unbounded ocean of consciousness within each of us, the big treasury, the field within each of us that is the base of all matter and all mind. It's been found that transcending and experiencing that unbounded, eternal level of life does wonders for education, and for human beings.

Stories have tangents; they open up and become different things. You can still have a structure, but you should leave room to dream. If you stay true to your ideas, filmmaking becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process. And if it's an honest thing for you, there's a chance that people will feel that, even if it's abstract.

During the course of a day, some dark feeling comes, maybe some sadness comes, some thrill, some great happiness, some strange humor. Cinema can embrace all that in one story, just as the story of life.

When you have something that brings a real emotion, that's the power of cinema.

A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It's a horror. I can't really listen to the music. I'm not really concentrating on it, and I'm not really concentrating on the painting.

My rule of thumb is, what Siskel and Ebert like, I don't, and vice versa.