I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that's becoming like a lost art in American cinema.

Leni Riefenstahl was the one person Goebbels had no control over in the filmmaking community of Nazi Germany, and they despised each other. But because she was Hitler's favorite, she could do what she wanted. She was the only filmmaker that did not have to cow down to Joseph Goebbels.

Movies are my religion and God is my patron. I'm lucky enough to be in the position where I don't make movies to pay for my pool. When I make a movie, I want it to be everything to me; like I would die for it.

Unfortunately, every time I have somebody play an instrument, it's always like, they don't know how to do it.

I'm a historian in my own mind.

It's my job to look at other people's humanity and it's my job to, 24/7, look at my life and listen to everything everyone says, watching their faces, the little idiosyncratic aspects of human beings - it's like a sponge, I take it in.

If the film isn't suspenseful, i.e. the pressure cooker situation of what's going on in the movie, if that's not part of it, if the threat of violence and the temperature isn't always going up a notch every scene or so, then the movie is going to be boring. It's not going to work.