I went to graduate film school at NYU, and at first I didn't get a degree, because I took a scholarship that was supposed to pay my tuition, and I used it to make a film. For the longest time, I never actually graduated. And about 70 percent of the things I learned there I had to unlearn, but 30 percent was really valuable. It's like Mark Twain said, "Don't let school get in the way of your education."

I didn't get the degree because in my last year, for my thesis film I made a feature called Permanent Vacation and they'd given me a scholarship, the Louis B Mayer fellowship and they made a mistake.

It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going.

I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural. I'm not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream.

I like marginal characters, I like real people. I learn more from talking to my plumber when he comes to fix my toilet than I do from meeting a movie star. I think my movies are in the same vein as that.

The Limits Of Control is not surrealism, but it is an experiment in which expectations are deliberately removed: expectations for narrative form, for action in a film, for certain emotional content. We wanted to remove those things and see if we could still make a film that was a beautiful film experience, with deliberately removing things many people would expect.

I have a real respect for tobacco as a substance, and it just seems very funny how the Western attitude is, "Wow, people are addicted to this, think of all the money you can make off it."