Older recordings just seemed to take me somewhere into my own pre-history. That's always been an interesting, sort of sphinx-like territory for me to wander around in.

I literally designed and built the sets myself, and I kind of liked it. I always gave myself eight weeks to do that - sometimes even 10 - and the shooting took five or six weeks.

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.

I've never made movies to reach millions of people.

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

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 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.