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

America is old tobacco: gold and green. It's lush and literally feels like wealth, like optimism, turn of the century America where everything was blooming.

As a first-time director, you cannot have final cut. But as a producer, you can have final cut.

Night is real. Night is not an absence of light, but in fact, it is daytime that is a brief respite from the looming darkness.

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 that in the past, in the '50s and '60s, after the existentialists and beatniks and hippie movements, the big deal was, Don't sell out. We live in a society that by virtue of the speed we communicate and sell, everything sells. The danger is buying in; that your concern becomes success, rather than fulfillment. They're two different beasts, and my feeling is that you should seek fulfillment. You should not measure your worth in how much you have or how popular you are, but how happy you are with what you do.

My life is a suitcase. I am the traveling Mexican.