I asked [Donald Trump] if he had any advice for Charles Foster Kane and he said, "Yeah, get yourself a different woman."

It's a kind of honour when I see how many people are imitating the style of how I make films.

If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

I used to say that interviewing others was perhaps the way I could stop talking and start listening. It's a kind of enforced silence.

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

It's so much easier to make a movie about someone who is so likeable that you just want to get out of the way.

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.