I'm not someone who enjoys long talks, long rehearsals. I'm very technical: I tell my actors, you come in, you sit down, you pick up a coffee, you look here, you say the line. We try it with the cameras rolling, and if it doesn't work, we adjust it until it does. It's very simple.

Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it's healthy to return to classical forms.

If I tell the audience what they should think, then I am robbing them of their own imagination and their own capacity of deciding what's important to them.

It's much harder to write a script that involves two people in a single location than 20 people in 30 different locations.

I think that religion is an integral part of human needs, but the question also is how you understand religion.

Personally, I can't stand violence. In any standard American mainstream movie, there's 20 times more violence than in any one of my films, so I don't know why those directors aren't asked why they're such specialists for violence.

Writers and filmakers, that is, people who describe the world, suffer from an occupational disease. They never experience moments in life quite spontaneously. You always look at yourself from the outside. Even as a child I always observed myself and the world. I believe that everyone who chooses this path in any way, who chooses to be a describer of life, suffers from this condition. It's like a mental obsession. It can be a great pity too. It robs you of a certain joy in spontaneity.