If you're going to succeed, you've got to be like one of those punch-drunk fighters in the old Warner Bros. boxing pictures: too stupid to fall down, you just keep slugging and stay on your feet.

To me, length is an artificial and arbitrary factor in a film.

I just tell you what a pleasure it is to get back to the kind of filmmaking I used to be allowed to do.

Stanley Kubrick was a big inspiration. People accuse me of never using my own material. But when did Kubrick? You look at his films and they are completely unique... completely separate entities.

The only person who can, with impunity, make the movie he wants to make, has got to be Steven Spielberg.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.