I think that if you have a sense of the sacredness of nature and of human relations, I think you will be uplifted in some sort of spiritual elevation.

When you see people on the street, they're living in their phones. They aren't living where they are - they haven't got the energy of the past. And so it's something that needs to be reestablished.

The information that was contained in a cathedral was based upon a common culture - a common Christian culture - and the elements were chosen for a common symbolic meaning. Someone who knew everything that was represented in a cathedral had a sort of encyclopedia - you can indeed call it that - but it was a selective encyclopedia, like encyclopedias back when they were books and the people writing them were supposed to be specialists in their field. I think today the problem is that people don't know how to choose between different kinds of information.

Mature people transmit to young people a certain wisdom that comes from maturity, but young people are close to a more intuitive wisdom, and they can give that back to older people who have lost it to their maturation.

I work very hard to achieve simplicity, which is never natural, never spontaneous. It's always obtained at the price of a great effort.

Baroque civilization believed in two truths, which for a post-18th-century mindset are exclusive truths - we have to eliminate one to believe the other. They believed in the rational exploration of the universe, and they also believed that there was a hidden spiritual truth. Baroque thinkers were able to live the two at the same time. In any case, for me, it's necessary to live that way also.

I have much respect for the people that I work with, and it's reciprocal. My shoots are always very calm. Everyone has their work to do, and we try to respect everyone's work and give them the time necessary. There's never any tension. That's something that helps to attain the simplicity that I'm looking for.