What is passion? Passion is surely the becoming of a person.

And you poor creatures--who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business, too?

I'm trying to suggest a kind of Middle Earth, in Tolkien terms. It's a contiguous world; it's like ours but different.

Movie-making is the process of turning money into light. All they have at the end of the day is images flickering on a wall.

There are always forces at work in a society, which are really forces of censorship - either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film.

Up until the middle to late '60s, it was a choice to film in black-and-white or color. But then television became so vital to a film's finance, and television won't show black-and-white. So that killed it off, really.

There are always forces at work in a society, certainly in America, which are really forces of censorship -either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film. And all art is fundamentally subversive, because it upsets people's perceptions, their notions about society. Therefore, art is dangerous, but good art is always making us reassess our thoughts and feelings about how we relate to other people. There are always people who fear that and want to suppress that.