Comedy is not commercial; it is risky, because what is funny in one place isn't always funny somewhere else.

Fast Food Nation was boring and aimed at yuppies, and yuppies don't eat fast food.

It's a lonely world, being independent, and they can come away with the idea that if Lloyd Kaufman can make movies with people getting their heads squashed, with hard-bodied lesbians, women masturbating with pickles, graphic diarrhea, and singing and dancing chicken zombies - if he can do that for 40 years and put his kids through Yale, Columbia, and Duke - if that idiot can do it, anybody can do it.

If Shakespeare had lived in our age, he would have been sued for writing Romeo And Juliet, because as everybody knows, he plagiarized that from an Italian play.

The dean of the American Film Institute has written that I'm one of the very few auteurs in America. I've had freedom for 40 years to create art that is totally personal and is what I believe in.

If you're an independent, you don't get on TV. And in the rare instances that you do get on, you get a fraction of what that very same movie would get if it came in through Fox or Viacom.

There is no way I could have ever dared to make a documentary, much less have the money to make a documentary, if it was on 16mm. But, with the magic of digital.