If youre writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.

I studied political science and international relations, so I never considered myself an artist.

If you read Herodotus, the first Greek historian 2,500 years ago, he was talking about that - about people mixing with other people. Sometimes it produces great societies. Sometimes it triggers war. But, we're not going to change that. I don't think so. We're living in nations that are state nations and countries.

I think cinema is the memory and the imagination of the country. Take the memory and imagination out of an individual, and he stops being an individual. I think its the same thing for a country.

I teach myself archaeology, I teach myself Spanish, and that's because it can be fun, it can be useful. So I keep studying. I read books because I still want to study. I don't want to stop.

I feel relief about the Oscars. You know, you're not in this business for prizes but, okay, I missed one.

Any place where you have to deal with many social actors like a school - you have the parents, the Ministry of Education, the school board, and the teachers - you need all kinds of sets and rules. You're trying to foresee anything that can happen and everything becomes really rigid. They don't want to talk about death because they don't want to overwhelm the children, but that has already happened, so you're not going to overwhelm them more.