I hate period films - and there are plenty of them - where they say, "Let's not do contemporary language because the audience won't understand it;" "let's not make the girls wear corsets, because it's not sexy" and all that sort of thing. Gradually it disintegrates into a no man's land: you don't really believe it's a period scene and it doesn't feel like it's now because it's not now. You don't feel it's quite real and you don't believe in it.

I'm developing the stuff all the time. There's a film in my head. I'm imagining a film.

People have been very resistant to giving me more than the standard amount of money. So I keep making films on a similar scale. Which is fine, but also frustrating.

The notion that acting is simply about intuitively responding to situations the way you feel couldn't be farther away from how I ask actors to work.

The kind of acting that's wholly literary or cerebral is wrong. It's useless for me to have actors so much in their heads that they can't be organic.

I wonder if I would have been capable of producing anything if I worked in a more conventional way with a prewritten script, because I'm of the procrastinator class.

There is a great tradition of independent filmmaking in the U.S. that I absolutely respect. There's some wonderful stuff that comes out in this country against all the odds.