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 always think that if you deal with extremely emotional, even melodramatic, subject matter, as I constantly do, the best way to handle those situations is at a sufficient remove. It's like a doctor and a nurse and a casualty situation. You can't help the patient and you can't help yourself by emoting. And I don't think cinema is intended for therapy, so I object also to that huge, massive manipulation which is perpetrated on the public.

I have transmitted genetic material, all I have to do between my daughters' birth and my death is to decorate my life.

Cinema has reached a dead end.

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.

I have often thought it was very arrogant to suppose you could make a film for anybody but yourself.

American actors are coy. We all have pricks and cunts, or are you different from the rest of us?