I think when you're young and have that first burst of energy and make five or six pictures in a row that tell the stories of all the things in life you want to say... well, maybe those are the films that should have won me the Oscar.

I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.

People want to classify and say, 'OK, this is a gangster film.' 'This is a Western.' 'This is a... ' You know? It's easy to classify and it makes people feel comfortable, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't really matter.

If everything moves along and there are no major catastrophes we're basically headed towards holograms.

[Action's] a Western thing. We think of the hero going into battle, rebelling against a government or an oppressor, but [in KUNDUN] action is nonaction or what appears to be nonaction. That's a hard concept for Western audiences. . . . We wanted to show a kind of moral action, a spiritual action, an emotional action. Some people will pick up on it; some won't.

I don't like being in houses alone.

Death comes in a flash, and that's the truth of it, the person's gone in less than 24 frames of film.