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

I've said many, many, many unkind things about Philadelphia, and I meant every one.

You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.

Film can't just be a long line of bliss. There's something we all like about the human struggle.

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.

There is an ocean of creativity within every human being.

Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.