Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist would who deals with who we are and our times or our relationships.

A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.

Music is a big factor in helping the illusion of the film come to life. The same way music brings back different periods of our lives.

The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

Of all the human evils, of which we have thousands of years of record and our own contemporary experiences, the most horrible evil of all is hypocrisy. It's this idea that there are those who do bad and there are those who do good, when, in fact, even the people who supposedly do good are saying they do good to mask the fact that they do evil.

My film isn't about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little we went insane.

The stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered the good work.