If anyone would like to hit me, they are perfectly welcome. I must warn you, though, that I might enjoy it. So maybe it's not the right kind of punishment.

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.

I am very romantic about communism even still, but I know terrible things happened.

It’s the opening of Manderlay in Cannes, and I’m sitting next to this guy who’s writing for a tiny fictitious French paper called ‘On the Sunny Side,’ and he’s writing a review on the film, and he’s obviously bored. Then he tells me about all the cars he owns, and how rich he is, and all these things... So, at a certain point, he says, "So what do you do?" Then I take out this very strange hammer we have in the Danish building business, and I say, "I kill." And then I kill him. It is as stupid as it sounds.

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

Everything is going to hell, but we should smile all the way.