I was called recently in some article "Hollywood's Oldest Established Rebel." So I'm sort of working from the inside now, with still a little bit of a rebellious spirit.

I love the process of making films and an incidental satisfaction is the fact that most of them made money.

There are eleven or twelve or thirteen cities in China with populations of over 10 million people and most people in the West have never even heard of these cities.

I look for the ability to work. Directing is hard work. They don't teach you that in film school. Critics are not aware of it, but it is hard, physical work.

People gravitate occasionally to the brilliantly made art low budget films, which is maybe one out of every five hundred low budget films made.

In science-fiction films the monster should always be bigger than the leading lady.

When I started I had no knowledge of films whatsoever. I was an engineering major at Stanford. And I found out as a senior that they had two film critics on the Stanford Daily, and they got free passes to all the theaters in Palo Alto. So I thought, I'll do that, and I became a film critic. And then I became interested in films. But I had no time to study anything in that area because I was a senior, just finishing up as engineering.