Cinema has reached a dead end.

Bill Viola is worth ten Scorseses.

Every historian has a vested interest. "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was not about the Roman but the British empire. What price the truth?

There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.

My favourite way of watching the cinema is the biggest possible cinema you can find, with the biggest possible screen, and the loudest possible Dolby - but just me. Nobody else.

I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos.

I acknowledge Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. They are prostlytizers of English socialism preaching to the converted and telling us what we already know. Cinema is best served away from documentary neo-realism. I come from a tradition of post-post-Italian neo-realism in England, where we've produced the best television in the world. But to paraphrase Truffaut, the English have no visual imagination.