I never had any ambition to be a star, or whatever it is called, and I'm still embarrassed at the word.

It's quite a dangerous career move to go wilfully on making films that may not find a distributor.

I've done lots of films with first directors, so it's not unusual for me.

Bong Joon-ho is enormously sensitive to performance. He knows what he needs to see and that's all he needs to shoot. He is so daring. We don't do that in the west. We shoot everything.

I think one of the things that is important, for me, though a lot of people would disagree with me, is that you be founded in theater so that you understand what an audience is, what kind of an animal it is and how to play with it. How to have fun with it, how to sympathize with it, all the things that an audience is. I don't think you're going to find that out unless you do theater.

Anything which retains interest is optimistic. When the characters become disinterested, it's pessimistic. Does that make sense?

I think you can get better in mathematics on a school level, but when you're talking about being a mathematician, I think that's definitely a gift of genes or whatever.