If you're not operating on an instinctive level, you're not an artist.... Reason over emotion is bullshit, absolute bullshit... We suffocate ourselves in rules. I find fantasy liberating.

And yet one carries the sins of his forebears as one carries their features in his face. One bears their blood, and their honor or their blight.

The fairies in the ancient notion of fairies, they are not positive and cute and twinkly.They can be incredibly nasty or they can be incredibly benign. It's a really interesting mythology when you dig into it.

"What makes a man a man?" a friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don't think so. It's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.

I feel that we have, as Mexicans, two things: one, a natural distrust of institutions. I hate organised religion, I hate organised politics, I hate the idea of the military and the police. Because we grew up distrusting all these sacred institutions, the only thing you have left is a vague, national sense of impending doom. Why do we drink and how are we so merry? Because we know that pretty soon, our time's up. There is a sense of fatality that makes us pretty chirpy people. You try to live. The only reason that dying is important is that it gives life sense.

I believe that pain can be a rite of passage into learning. I believe that the worse thing that can happen is the sin of banality and comfort. Those things are in my movies, but also my movies are quite the fruit of somebody who defines himself as an agnostic.

I think there are movies that are so gigantic that you need a second unit