In film, life-and-death struggles make you sit up, lean forward a little bit. They amplify things happening, in smaller ways, in all of us. These things show up in relationships. They show up in struggles and bring them to a critical point.

You don't need a special place to meditate. You can transcend anywhere in the world. The unified field is here, and there, and everywhere.

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.

I've always loved the electric guitar: to hold it and work it and hear what it does is unreal.

I started Transcendental Meditation in 1973 and have not missed a single meditation ever since. Twice a day, every day. It has given me effortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity and happiness deep within.

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

When I was little in Spokane, Washington I drew all the time... and my father would bring paper home... and I mostly drew browning automatic water-cooled sub-machine guns... that was my favorite.