You could say that when you introduce humour to your work, you also step back a little from it. You create a distance

When I was in film school, it was said that all good films were characterised by some form of humour.

It is more difficult to manipulate with film than, for instance, video. The problem with video is that it gives you a thousand possibilities.

Only a fool does not fear actors, but you can't beat them, and if you can't beat them, join them, as they say. As I've got older I've become very interested in that part of the work

If I made a musical in the beginning of my career, it would have been crane shots and tracking shots and people coming out of cakes and whatever, but these techniques are something that I’ve left behind me.

There is no creative expression of artistic value that has ever been produced by ex-drunkards and ex-drug-addicts. Who the hell would bother with a Rolling Stones without booze or with a Jimi Hendrix without heroin?

I am a man of very many anxieties but doing strange things with the camera is not one of them.