Unfortunately, my ideas are not what you'd call commercial, and money really drives the boat these days. So I don't know what my future is. I don't have a clue what I'm going to be able to do in the world of cinema.

I would rather not make a film than make one where I don't have final cut.

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

My mother refused to give me coloring books as a child. She probably saved me, Because when you think about it, what a coloring book does is completely kill creativity.

This is a donut. It is very sweet, and very good. But if you've never tasted a donut, you wouldn't really know how sweet and how good a donut is... meditation is like that. Transcendental Meditation gives an experience much sweeter than the sweetness of this donut.

Every viewer is going to get a different thing. That's the thing about painting, photography, cinema.

Directors who have inspired me include Billy Wilder, Federico Fellini, lngmar Bergman, John Ford, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola and Ernst Lubitsch. In art school, I studied painters like Edward Hopper, who used urban motifs, Franz Kafka is my favorite novelist. My approach to film stems from my art background, as I go beyond the story to the sub-conscious mood created by sound and images.