You get to have some mischief before you're basically a blackened banana, impotent, and nothing to be afraid of.

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 started making movies in my late 20s, that time in an artist's career that often sees artists just imitating things that he or she loves. I just wanted to be great like L'Age d'Or vintage Buñuel. I wanted to be Busby Berkeley, for crying out loud! I wanted to have chorus girls stomping their heels in my casting office. I wanted to be Erich Von Stroheim monogramming underwear for extras. So I started off my career doing that, and that was fun, but I realised I wasn't very good at it.

I was completely broke, so I started saying yes to everything. I said yes to a woman who approached me about shooting the Dracula ballet, even though I felt like I was probably going to sabotage it.

I guess to the outside observer, all my movies look like musty old black-and-white artifacts, but my earlier movies had been more static and tableaux-ish.

I've been so lazy all my life. I used to literally lie on the couch, up until the age of 35, fearing that my bones were dissolving like sugar cubes, from disuse.

I love Toronto's long autumns, warm with windy swirls of golden spores, redolent with giant, sun-roasted leaves flapping up and down the streets, and horrible winter always seeming far, far off!