I felt from time to time that shooting live music is the most purely cinematic thing you can do. Ideally, the cinema is becoming one with the music. There is little artifice involved. There's no acting. I love it.

I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something's going on, somebody's going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.

I like finding a great shot and then just staying with it for a long time, not trying to pump things up with some kind of artificial energy by cutting.

Extraordinary people are the Green Berets and the Navy Seals and the Olympic athletes - these are the ones who can face these extraordinary physical challenges and be triumphant.

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

When Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money!

I remember the Neil Young brand hitting me very hard immediately. He wasn't an acquired taste. I loved him immediately.