The underlying issues, the psychological motives, in all my movies have been the same, he said. Personal responsibility and friendship, the importance of a compassionate life as opposed to a passionate life.

I was going to go to a four-year college and be an anthropologist or to an art school and be an illustrator when a friend convinced me to learn photography at the University of Southern California. Little did I know it was a school that taught you how to make movies! It had never occurred to me that I'd ever have any interest in filmmaking.

You have to understand that it's a very cooperative world, not only with the environment, with but our fellow human beings. If you do not cooperate, if you do not work together to keep the entire organism going, the whole thing dies, and everybody dies with it. That's a law of nature, and it's existed forever. We're one of the very few creatures that has a choice, and can intellectualize the process.

I am more of a visual person than a verbal person. For me, I think, the excitement is the fact that I found a way of telling the story as I want to tell it, in a medium that I could master.

I regret not the things I have done, only those I have yet to do.

All art is dependent on technology because it's a human endeavour , so even when you're using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that's technology .

Sound is 50 percent of the movie going experience, and I've always believed audiences are moved and excited by what they hear in my movies at least as much as by what they see.