Star Wars has always struck a chord with people. There are issues of loyalty, of friendship, of good and evil... The theme came from stories and ideas that have been around for thousands of years.

I haven't met anybody who hasn't been able to describe years and years and years of very, very difficult struggle through the whole process of achieving anything whatsoever. And there's no way to sort of get around that.

I'm very proud of all the movies I made. I am very happy with everything I've done. I like to watch my movies. Some of them work. Some of them don't. Some of them people like, most of them they don't.

Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer.

Before I became a film major, I was very heavily into social science, I had done a lot of sociology, anthropology, and I was playing in what I call social psychology, which is sort of an offshoot of anthropology/sociology - looking at a culture as a living organism, why it does what it does.

All democracies turn into dictatorships - but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea.

I've had much more down in my life than I've had up. And much more struggle. First of all, when I went into the film school everybody said, "What are you doing? This is a complete dead-end for a career."