Very often I've known people who wouldn't say a word to each other, but they'd go to see movies together and experience life that way.

Vertigo is probably my favourite Hitchcock film and probably one of my favourite films of all time. It's a film that I'm obsessed with. I saw it on its first release in vista vision, projected in vista-vision, at the Capitol Theatre in New York. That moment when the nun comes up in the end... it's just an extraordinary shot.

I've seen many, many movies over the years, and there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to continue to make films.

Well the thing is that the New York of 1846 to 1862 was very different from downtown New York now. Really nothing from that period still exists in New York.

The term 'giant' is used too often to describe artists. But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.

I was rather shaken by all the green trees. I always am. It gets me. I don't want to be funny about it but I am. I loved seeing all the westerns, but I had asthma and couldn't go anywhere, but I loved watching them in Technicolor and seeing the cowboys and the landscapes of Monument Valley and you'd see the forests of the Anthony Mann films and think, 'wow, that's fantastic', but I could never go there!

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.