Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things.

You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.

But at a certain point, and I don't really know... people have asked me this. I don't know exactly what it was that pushed me towards directing, but I think it was a naive notion that if I directed I would be able to play all the roles. A kind of greed.

There are no “old” movies-only movies you have already seen and ones you haven't.

Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things.

If filmmakers are ignorant of the past, they laborto re-invent the wheel in every picture. You sit and think, 'Well,we're back to 1903 here.'

I think one of the reasons younger people don't like older films, films made say before the '60s, is that they've never seen them on a big screen, ever. If you don't see a film on a big screen, you haven't really seen it. You've seen a version of it, but you haven't seen it. That's my feeling, but I'm old-fashioned.