It's so easy to manipulate an audience, but it's nearly always clear that you are being manipulated. I think even people that are not critically attuned are aware of cynical manipulation in 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.

The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead.

All the interesting films are now being made by their subsidiaries for very low budgets. But the studios are not making money. They're making these big, very expensive pictures that take a lot of money but don't really pay for their costs. So they're having a very difficult time. I can see the system breaking down. I think the American studios are a reflection or a metaphor for American industry altogether, which is failing in the world. Its economic domination is being broken down and I think the same thing is happening to the studios.

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

Black-and-white gives you that sort of parallel world. Also, it's very close to the condition of dreaming, to the unconscious.