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 only storyboard scenes that require special effects, where it is necessary to communicate through pictures.

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.

I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.

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.

I was in Japan, and my assistant director had worked with Kurosawa. I used quite of number of Kurosawa's crew.