Motion pictures are the art form of the 20th century, and one of the reasons is the fact that films are a slightly corrupted artform. They fit this century - they combine Art and business!

Maybe it's just a matter of getting older and being aware that the market for medium-budget and low-budget films, which is of course what I spent most of my life making, has diminished. And maybe the quantity of ideas has diminished a little bit.

First, you have to be intelligent. I have never met a successful director who isn't intelligent. A director who is not intelligent might have one hit picture, but he won't be able to follow it up. So I look for intelligence.

When I started in the late 1950s, every film I made - no matter how low the budget - got a theatrical release. Today, less that 20-percent of our films get a theatrical release.

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.

A great director, first, is highly intelligent. And he is also a dedicated and willing to work hard. Now those are easy things to identify. The third is the creativity, and that is very difficult to identify in advance. This is why so many of the directors who have started with me were my assistant - the first one was Francis Ford Coppola.

Other writers, producers, and directors of low-budget films would often put down the film they were making, saying it was just something to make money with. I never felt that. If I took the assignment, I'd give it my best shot.