I have a very, very secret drive to become a dilettante, without the pejorative overtones or the obligation to produce myself. There's so much to examine, so much to contemplate. I have enormous enthusiasm when I start a new project but then there's the meetings and the counter-meetings, the rehearsals, the struggles. You have to keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get your dreams realised.

There are, after all, approaches to be made other than the dependable routes that massage sentimental expectations and provide easy opportunities for emotional identification.

I can't think of anyone who has done anything remotely useful after the age of 80.

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?

Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film.

I do feel for me that cinema has somehow ceased to be a spectator sport. I get tremendous excitement out of making it rather than watching it.

There's more religion in my little finger than there is in the pope. But no, I don't believe in God. I am an athiest. A Darwinian evolutionist.