I wanted to make a real love story with a bad ending, because a love story that ends good is the life of everyone - you and I, for example. I always say to people, You know, if Romeo and Juliet got married, nobody would care about them. Imagine Romeo and Juliet, six kids yelling, mama, mama, papa, papa.

Life is complex. You don't have any person who is nice from the beginning until the end. You don't always have the notion of redemption. The bad people don't always pay.

A real love story has to finish bad. That is what I think.

There's this scene in "The Night of the Hunter" when the kids are downstairs, and you have the feeling that they're both in a room and at the same time it looks remote. And you wonder, How can you give the effect of both "inside" and "outside" at the same time. And you realize, by watching it many times, that around the scene there's this black edging.

War always takes you by surprise.

For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.

My mother always told me I had to do 100 times better than a man. I had to work hard at maths, and learn four languages.