Listen, I like great actors. You can be a movie star without being a great actor - this has been proved several times - and I like my casts to have great actors. Acting is more important to me than being a star.

It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.

The way that I sort of direct the writers is, let's do the best story we can. Let's not worry about production issues. 'How much will that cost? How are we going to shoot that?' Let's not set up those constraints on the writing. I don't think it helps the project to work like that.

Pretty soon we'll have robots in our society, you're going to have a lot of automated processes that used to be done by people - this is happening. Society and technology is changing so fast, and the impact of the change on society and technology is global, not local.

How do you make RoboCop? How do you slowly bring a guy to be a robot? How do you actually take humanity out of someone and how do you program a brain, so to speak, and how does that affect an individual?

Measurements, observations, descriptions can only be considered scientific when they are independently confirmed by other people.

I don't actually like blocking actors. I prefer giving actors freedom. They don't have to step on a precise mark with me. Instead of giving marks to the actors I like to give marks to the camera.