As soon as you start making a film that's expensive then the studio wants total control over all elements of it because they want to get all their money back. If you make a smaller film you can try a lot more things because you can have control over it and not just be a hired director. The lower the budget the more freedom you have.

Those of us who make films try to make something that we're feeling and that we would like. Then we just hope an audience responds the same way. It's very important to have the electrical circuit made, but I don't have control over how people feel when they flip the switch. So the whole idea of marketing research and test screenings is just foreign to me.

Baseball is one of the most beautiful games. It is. It is a very Zen-like game.

For me music is totally freeing, and it's its' own language too. You follow it, in a way.

I'm still trying to learn how to do it, I'm still trying to figure out how to make films, but, yeah, it started then [in 1979].

The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It's part of America.

I didn't get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.