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

With war and famine and flood and special effects films, when you do somebody under duress, you have to be really be inventive and the risk of keeping it very simple is you might loose some of the audience because it's not overt, it's hidden, not coming at you. Then you might cut through to some of this numbness and reach something profound and tragic.

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.

The best conversation with Stanley Kubrick is a silent one: you sit in a theatre and watch his films and you learn so much.

It's spiritual, a man that has a past and regrets, but you can as a director take a shot, and there's something in the eyes and the face, you just can't fake it, you can't teach it, and I think Ed Harris has that quality.

There's such a deep, conservative feeling in 'The way Back.' You go, 'gosh, we've gotten narrow.' So at the moment I think there's a kind of tension, and it's gold rush fever.

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