The movies that I do are in love with cinema, and I try to show that I am in love with cinema. I want them to be, in other ways, drinking from other sources.

You live and die two or three times making a movie. First, you write it, and the first pivotal moment comes when you can get it made. The second is in the process of making it, when the movie reveals itself to you, its flaws and its virtues. Then the most unnerving moment is when that movie is then launched into the world. It’s like bringing your kid to the first day at school and somebody points out that it has bowlegs, it is cross-eyed, or it’s gorgeous. You feel very exposed.

If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer.

I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue

I find I'm waking up really early now, just to read. Waking up at ungodly hours. But I try to keep up, religiously. When I was a kid, it used to be a book a day. Then a book a week. Now it's like a book every two weeks. But I read every day.

When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it.

I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen