There are some things that are real, that you can see, that you can observe, like the moon, and grass and things. But for ideas to become real, they have to be played on your senses.

I had this spooky psychological thing about 'The Piano' before it began, which was how everybody was going to go nuts on the set. Because a film tends to set up the way people are going to behave.

I think feature film can be quite conservative, because you have to now get audiences to come out, and it's quite a hard thing to do. Of course, television can be conservative too.

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.

I think if it's interesting, it's interesting, and if it's not, it's not working.

I think that the romantic impulse is in all of us and that sometimes we live it for a short time, but it's not part of a sensible way of living. It's a heroic path and it generally ends dangerously. I treasure it in the sense that I believe it's a path of great courage. It can also be the path of the foolhardy and the compulsive.

With 'Bright Star' and with 'The Piano,' too, I felt a kind of sadness about it being in such a different era, because of my lack of experience with the era. And one of the ways I'd get over it is to remind myself that every film, even if it's contemporary, creates its own world.