I've always been fascinated by Eisenstein.

I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.

I don't believe that one has to tear down the cinema screen in order to renew cinema. But new input and new energy are lacking. They are flowing above all into the television technologies. We must, therefore, concentrate on the CD-ROM.

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.

Tulse Luper, who without too many confessions, in a sense, is a fictive version of me. I have to say he has far more exciting adventures, and certainly a lot of them sexual, than ever I've experienced. But in a sense, what you do with an alter ego, you give them all sorts of permissions and licences which you know you'll never be able to embrace in your real life.

Continuity is boring.

In a world where we can all be our own filmmakers, the old elites are disappearing and there is no desire to look at somebody else's dream anymore because you can go off and make your own.