I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.

To make great movies, there is an element of risk. You have to say, 'Well, I am going to make this film, and it is not really a sure thing.'

In America, even the critics - which is a pity - tend to genre-ize things. They have a hard time when genres get mixed. They want to categorize things. That's why I love Wes Anderson's films and the Coen Brothers, because you don't know what you're going to get, and very often you get something that you don't expect and that's just what a genre's not supposed to do.

Films and hotels have many aspects that are the same. For example, there is always a big vision, an idea.

When a movie is about to come out on its initial debut, there are a lot of people involved - the financiers, the studio and the producers and also, many times, the foreign distributors. So it is a time of tremendous pressure and uncertainty.

Most filmmakers can't afford to try something out that doesn't work.

The very earliest people who made film were magicians.