I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.

I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.

If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.

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

I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart.

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley. But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them