Producing films was a distraction for me for which I payed dearly.

I admit that some of my ideas may have turned out to be pessimistic in nature.

I don't enter into particulars with [Ennio Morricone]. I give him the feeling and the suggestions of the characters.

Charlie Chaplin, too, through spectacle, contraband certain ideas, put them through, ideas that even today are not being expressed by great statesmen and politicians.

The American public is a very specialized public.

It [film-making] really just has to do with my own ghosts and phantoms. And I have to say, in the end, it's just my way of seeing things.

I'm terrified by young people who are doing what they think is film making. What they're really doing is taking that convulsed, fast rhythm of commercials. It's not film making.