I guess what inspires me most is the desire to draw out feelings that feel best expressed on the written page by really good authors, and I'm not a really good author. I feel like my job as a filmmaker is to eff the ineffable, to take feelings that only poets could describe with words and try to project them on the screen for viewers to feel. I don't think I've succeeded once but in the act of trying I've come up with all these other results which sometimes intrigue me.

I'm a nervous wreck. If it's a 20-day shoot, at lunchtime on the first day, I'm thinking "Only 19 and a half days to go... I can make it!"

You also convert real memories, whatever that means, into film versions of those memories. Because by the time you've finished the project you can't remember the real memories anymore, you just remember the film versions of them. And then if the film failed you have distaste for them. So I don't think about that stuff anymore.

I'm starting to frighten myself, because I'm backsliding into my devil-may-care attitude. I'm sure it's going to catch up with me.

I like going out to popcorn-munchers.

I went to see Chicago after I finished shooting, and say what you want about it, but that thing was so meticulously planned. It was planned like NASA planned its trips to the moon. It made me feel like some sort of horrible dilettante.

I love melodrama. I love the simple fact. When you read Euripides he's a page turner. It's like reading a Mexican comic book romance.