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

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.

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

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

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.

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

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