More personal films, you could make them, but your budgets would be cut down.

It’s also true that I might have never made Taxi Driver [1976] were it not for the success of Alice [Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 1974]. The question of commercialism is a source of worry. Must one make a choice, must it be a matter of either setting your sights on winning an Academy Award and becoming a millionaire, or making only the movies you want to make and starving to death?

We cannot burn Mick Jagger. We want the effect, but we can't burn him.

The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.

Young film makers should learn how to deal with the money and learn how to deal with the power structure. Because it is like a battle.

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

Hong Kong cinema is something you can't duplicate anyway.