Death is a part of life, and eventually I assimilated that completely.

I feel like Alain Delon, who once said, "It doesn't matter that I'm not a star in America because I'm a huge star in France, I'm a legend in Spain, and I'm a god in Japan.

It's hard to give a dramatic shape to even the most dramatic life. . . . you are forced not just into selectivity, but into alteration, distortion and outright lying about what did and didn't happen.

I think that one of the things that is happening in the so-called "clash of civilizations" is that the confidence that was once obvious in the Western Judeo-Christian tradition has been weakened tremendously. There's a feeling that there's a cynical, corporate layer that's really driving it - one that's ready to compromise - and that the real confident energy around the world is coming from Islam, that the believers take their own faith at face value and with great confidence and in far greater numbers.

Most of my movies get about a third raves, a third vicious attacks, and a third in-between.

Much as I like getting awards in Oldenburg, Germany and Torino, it's nice to get one in America.

I'd been basically anchored in New York for three years, but I fled to L.A. after the funeral and decided that I had to start a movie immediately. It was the only way to avoid becoming overwhelmed by depression. And that meant financing the film myself because there is no such thing as "immediately" in movies that one writes.