Silent films were, I think, more different than we know to sound films. We think of it as simply that we added dialogue and in actual fact I think it was an entirely different art form.

I love stories and I don't like to repeat myself. And I look for new stuff, and as they say it gets harder.

Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised.

You can mix in certain sensitivities as a filmmaker.

I love a chance to shoot real locations, because in films in the earlier days before people traveled as much, it was exotic to see a film set in Switzerland, and that area has been taken over by CGI, mostly, and fantasy landscapes. It's unusual to see this much landscape, people say it's old fashioned. So what you're referring to is there was that period in the '50s and '60s when there were epics and you saw landscape.

I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive.

When I began making films, they were just movies: 'What's the new movie? What are you doing?' Now they're called 'adult dramas.'