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!

In truly great films - the ones that people need to make, the ones that start speaking through them, the ones that keep moving into territory that is more and more unfathomable and uncomfortable - nothing's ever simple or neatly resolved. You're left with a mystery.

Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.

I've been to North Africa many times.

I'm often asked by younger filmmakers, 'Why do I need to look at old movies?' I've made a number of pictures in the last 20 years and the response I have to give them is that I still consider myself a student. The more pictures I've made in 20 years, the more I realize I really don't know. And I'm always looking for something or someone that I could learn from. I tell the younger filmmakers, and the young students, that do it like painters used to do—that painters do—study the old masters, enrich your palette, expand the canvas. There's always so much more to learn.

I've been thrown out of schools and fired from jobs. I don't want to work. I can honestly say I haven't done an honest day's work in my life.

I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters.