I was an altar boy, a spokesperson for the Virgin Mary, I was a choir boy but then at the age of 14 I discovered masturbation and all that went out the window.

I only produce movies that have something stylistically different, so that I can learn from the experience of producing.

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.

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.

I think Hollywood has a habit of developing 100 times more than they actually shoot.

"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.

What is fantastic for me is that the Romantic movement comes out as a counter balance to everything that has been accumulating since the Age of Reason. I think the downfall of imagination as a genre or as a perception starts with the Age of Reason, which says everything else that came before us, all those superstitions, all those myths, are childish.