The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.

Painting is the supreme form of expression; you don't need to 'read' painting.

I really, sincerely believe that one should trust the work, and not the author.

Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.

Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

I obviously irritate people. I obviously antagonise them.