I went to good schools, and I've just always had an allergic reaction to snobbishness - always found myself preferring to blend into the woodwork. I have an affinity to those who, in a sense, failed.

I may love individual people, but I am contemptuous of the arrogance , and in a way, it's both ruined me and fuels me. It's ruined me because nobody cares about these issues, and then it's the source of most of my storytelling now, because I am so preoccupied with it. It fuels me, because this is my outrage. I do believe in that great tradition of literature and storytelling. You know, the downfall and the folly of it all.

In my films quite often, paranoia usually leads to the truth so it is kind of a psychological state of mind to think that what you fear may come true, and those are the types of stories that I like to tell.

I love filmmaking when fate is a part of the process and you are dependent on the laws of physics and the elements to get a single moment that transports or in some way creates an illusion even for a moment. I think that is tremendous fun and what I think filmmaking is, catching lightning in a bottle.

There are scripts that have come our way that are much more likely to be hits, but we don't really think that way.

The nature will continue, it's our existence that is finite and you are given this gift of life and you make your way with it, but fate and natural disasters will continue on.

The whole film business was built on immigrants: Billy Wilder and Michael Curtiz and all these hefty lads.