I am half-Jewish, and yet really hadn't been brought up within the Jewish faith. So I had felt culturally Jewish, if that's possible, without really understanding it.

Every milieu has something ridiculous about it - film-making, the music world, painting - because people who take themselves seriously become funny pretty quickly.

In a way, a lot of my work is in the re-writing once it is cast, as I adapt to the rhythms of how the roles are played out by the actors.

I do think it is a kind of illness in the sense that it sets you apart, it injects you with an endless, unslakable thirst to keep making the thing. The artist has to voluntarily use themselves endlessly.

In a way, after you're done directing there is a sense of amnesia that washes over you, you can't exactly remember how you did things. It's a zone, just like an athlete, when they can't remember what they did, but somehow got it done.

Novels have become equally important to me as films. I consider myself a storyteller and passionately engaged in both of those disciplines.

I was always very curious about other people. I would always stare and my mother would say - just please close your mouth!