The power of sound to put an audience in a certain psychological state is vastly undervalued. And the more you know about music and harmony, the more you can do with that.

There's nothing quite like the idea of failing spectacularly to excite a film maker

The function of camera movement is to assist the storytelling. That's all it is. It cannot be there just to demonstrate itself.

I started using film as part of live theatre performance - what used to be called performance art - and I became intrigued by film.

Obviously, I try to make the films work for an audience. That's the main point of making a film, and in retrospect, one can see that certain films, let's say Leaving Las Vegas, demonstrated its own success.

In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.

I had no plans to be a director.