The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world.

You walk through a series of arches, so to speak, and then, presently, at the end of a corridor, a door opens and you see backward through time, and you feel the flow of time, and realize you are only part of a great nameless procession.

Once you have found the right shot to introduce the scene-written your first declarative sentence-then the rest flows. You've found the key to the whole scene.

Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place they're capable of anything.

A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.

When you make motion pictures, each picture is a life unto itself. When you finish and the picture is over, there's an understanding, a realization that we'll never be assembled this way again. That these relationships are severed forever and ever. And each of these films is a little life.

Whenever something is convenient or was modified after 1970, you probably shouldn't use it as root.