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.

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

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.

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?

We live in a time of excess - excess population, excess information.

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.

I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.