It's an unhealthy habit to say that life is what you make of it, and if you want to be happy, then you can be happy. That's just rubbish, basically. Life is about luck and it's about circumstances and socioeconomic conditions and all the rest of it, but you know, you can also make choices. It's about spirit and generosity and all the other things, too.

There have always been and there always will be the peripheral sideline activities which are a form of entertainment, which is to say you pay a couple of cents and you see something freakish. That is what reality TV is.

You will find hardly any improvising on camera anywhere in my films. It's very structured, but it's all worked out from elaborate improvisations over a long period, as you know.

I've long since stopped worrying about how I'm portrayed in the press because ultimately it's not that important. Everyone who knows me knows I do what I do with the greatest integrity.

The good thing from my perspective is that nobody puts any pressure on me to say what it's going to be. The backers accept that they don't know what they are going to get.

For me the journey of making a film is a journey of discovery as to what that film is. I mean what I do is what other artists do, painters, novelists, people that make music, poets, sculptors, you name it. It's about starting out and working with the material and discovering through making, working with the material the artifact.

The reason my films work is because every actor on set is very secure. They're able to fly.