When you look at our world, the truth is that we're all under the influence of politics.

Making the City Of Joy gave me the best political education of my life. It became a wrestling match between an Englishman who had gradually ceased to be a Marxist, and a culture that was becoming more Marxist by the day.

I like cinema audiences. I respect them, and I talk to them just like I would anybody I know.

Very good coaches for ski jumpers stand at the top of the slope and watch the jumpers prepare, rather than standing at the bottom and watching them land.

I simply wanted to state that during this little slice of history, this is what happened and these were the good sides of it, these were the more dangerous sides of it, and this was the result.

Conventionally, one looks at history as something of the past. But after Einstein, who knows what is in the past and what is in the present?

I think a film should have a gestation period of at least two or three years.