Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.

There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can't reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections

If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.

And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.