As a woman, she [Penelope Cruz] obviously has changed as she has become an adult. But, as an actress, I actually might say that she has not changed that much. And she has something great, especially in comedy, and she hasn't been exploited as much as she could be in comedy, but particularly in that mix between comedy and drama. She's got a very special quality about her. You can place her in very extreme situations, especially very painful situations, in terms of how her character interprets it. And sometimes, the deeper and more human that pain is, the better she is at it.

I'm a very dull passenger. I don't speak. I don't have sex. No alcohol. I don't do drugs. The thing that I like about flying is that I feel like I can really concentrate. I used to write many things, and many ideas for my movies belong to this moment where I'm not anywhere specifically in terms of time and space and geography. I am suspended, and this suspension fits me very well.

Whenever I arrive on a real location, I have to move around and work out what the best angles are going to be.

All my movies are difficult to classify because they are very eclectic in mixing genres.

Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities.

The 1980s really ended for me in 1992 with the film Kika.

When I'm writing, I don't put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.