The competition is not really friendly or peaceful. It leads to oppression in some ways.

Perhaps my favourite story is 'Le Passe-Muraille' by Marcel Ayme. It's about a guy who wakes up with a weird faculty that means he can walk through walls. He's a very shy clerk, and he uses it to get revenge, or vent his frustration.

I'm not judging the films. People make these connections through a film, or because they know them. But the fact that they erase them and have to start from scratch, I think that's an important point. A lot of kids, when they have a camera, have tended to do remakes of existing films. You have a lot of kids that make Star Wars. And I think that's creativity, but not as much creativity as starting from scratch.

There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished.

The first dolly track was somebody who had the idea to put the camera on a boat on a canal. So the boat would move very slowly but steadily. So they would see all that surrounds you and you'd see the landscape changing slowly. So that was the first time.

I think it's a problem when journalists have the title of their article before they do the interview, because it biases the way they conduct it.

I would define myself as being naive and perverse at the same time. And I think that if that is consistent it will make the tone consistent.