When you finish a film, before the first paying audience sees it, you don't have any idea. You don't know if you made a success or a flop, when it comes to the box office.

Ideological pressure is much more crippling than commercial pressure. Crippling to your own freedom of thinking and creating, crippling the final results. If you wanted to succeed during the really hard-line totalitarian regime, you have to make so many compromises to please the censors that you don't recognize the original idea from the final result.

The Czech movies, the quality movies, are trying to show the life in the country as it is, in an entertaining way, while in America, the majority of movies are wonderful fairy tales.

People who make documentaries have to be faithful to the facts. But when you are making a drama, a fiction based on the life, all you have to be faithful to is the spirit of the facts, which I think I was in every case. As long as you don't violate their spirit, you can play with the facts.

When you finish a film, before the first paying audience sees it, you don't have any idea. You don't know if you made a success or a flop, when it comes to the box office.

You really see life around the principals to be as important as the main, principal actors. That's what cinéma vérité taught me - that it's not a question of having a main character, a great actor, and the rest is unimportant. Every detail, every face in the crowd is important.

I'm convinced the Beatles are partly responsible for the fall of Communism.