I always tell the younger filmmakers and students: Do it like the painters used to...Study they old masters. Enrich your palette. Expand the canvas. There's always so much more to learn.

The bottom line is, I tend to be going back to older and older music.

There are movies that change the whole way in which films are made, like Klute, where Gordon Willis’s photography on the film is so textured, and, they said, too dark.

If it's a modern-day story dealing with certain ethnic groups, I think I could open up certain scenes for improvisation, while staying within the structure of the script.

I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

I don't know how else to tell the story except to utilise that vocabulary: the rain, the darkness, the mansions, the framing, etc, the lighting and that sort of thing.

The more you see, especially being young, the more you see the past, the more you can draw upon that and the more you can make the present and the future. It's how you process the past and at oftentimes in the picture, there are references to certain imagery from certain pictures, and certain novels.