When I started, we had just the camera and the person, mostly. And if you wanted to do a dolly shot, particularly working in Chicago where I began, you'd get in the back trunk of a car, and you'd have a friend drive the car, or you'd get in some kid's little wagon that he plays with and have someone pull that for dolly shots.

I am part of a system which encourages people to buy things and do things which are not to their best interest.

When you hear the word tear gas you think, well, your eyes will burn and that's it. But that whole feeling of your whole skin burning, that you can't breathe, you can't inhale, you feel suffocated - it's a very, very terrifying experience.

In "Virginia Woolf" I had a thing which the grips called the paraplegic which was a wheelchair thing that I had made up years before where I could stand on this bicycle-like device and be pushed down the hall, and then step off it with a handheld camera.

I've been in wars and in riots and hung out of many helicopters in the early days. And there's a detachment that happens when you look through the camera. You're looking for the shot.

Now, I have to - in my defense, I have the say that general knowledge of the deadly nature of cigarettes was not primarily in my mind and nor was it on these poor cowboys, who - many of whom who've died of emphysema since we were shooting.

When I search myself carefully I do think it's from my mother. I even feel strange saying that. Most people, I believe, when they're asked profound questions about their own persona are not really able to enunciate it, because it's a combination of so many things. But certainly influences early on that I felt from my mother. I wouldn't say she was "political" per se; she was sensitive to other people.