I think if you think of yourself as religious and if you're given a gift, some may not think it's that great a gift - some critics. But others might, you know. So you say, look - whether it's good, bad or indifferent, this is what I do.

Music and film are inseparable. They always have been and always will be.

And so you try your best. Sometimes you go in with one thing, with one desire and come out with something else. In the case of 'The Aviator' it was to create a Hollywood spectacle, but by about the second or third week of shooting you just want to literally survive it. Because don't forget, I also go through the editing process too, and when the film is released I have to talk about it. So, I take all of that very seriously.

There is something particularly unique about the films of Hong Sang-soo...it's got to do with his masterful sense of storytelling... as the critic Manny Farber once said of Hitchcock's ROPE Hong Sang-soo's pictures unpeel like an orange.

I don't like being in houses alone.

The tone of the picture and the atmosphere was in my head and in my blood in a way once I'd decided to make the picture. I had to find my way through that to choose, select, emphasise certain visual elements and sound.

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?