Nothing beats a live performance. Nothing.

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

As much as I love acoustic Neil Young - and I do deeply - I may be more passionate about the electric. Luckily it's not a contest, and we never have to make that choice. But Neil Young on an electric guitar - I feel like I've never seen or heard anything like it.

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

I think music is just a wonderful ingredient that helps us understand a scene better. And certainly you can overuse music, and you can use the wrong music. I probably have been guilty of these things over time. But if you use music correctly as a friend of the theme, a friend of the narrative, ou can lend some terrific connective tissue to a film.

It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.

I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters.