Everything I've made - it doesn't mean they've all been good - but everything I've made so far, big or little, fiction or documentary, has been something that I've been really enthusiastic about.

If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something. Or, you have to be singing in a vocabulary that has tremendous appeal or else people are not going to want to sit there for eighty or ninety minutes hearing this stuff.

If you're doing a music film, you've got to be singing about something.

I'm of Neil Young's generation. Neil Young's songs have spoken to what it's like to be at least a white male of his generation over the years. Endlessly, he's sung about the stuff that I really care about. He's put into words the feelings that hit you at different transitional moments in life.

Maybe that's where the new art comes in - to somehow have your eye on the marketplace and harness your art to come up with something you can be proud of creatively.

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 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.