America was built on an attempted genocide, anyway. Guns were completely necessary.

I like to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting.

I love variation in all forms: in painting, in music.

I love riding on a bus now because you're looking down on the world from not too high of an angle, but people on the street rarely look up into the bus. They're sort of oblivious to this big giant machine, you know, passing by. So there's something very beautiful about the angle that you look at the world through.

Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.

Jim Jarmusch: Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

Now in the States if you look at the TV, you see the advertisements, the TV programmes, the pop videos, and the movies, they're all the same style. I think it's very condescending to the audience to assume they only have a three second attention span and so they don't leave anything on the screen for any longer. I don't understand that.