Regret isn't going to get me anywhere. It's like being obsessed with something. It doesn't bring you anywhere.

The best education in film is to make one

I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.

I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, Mr. President, but I do say not more than ten to twenty million dead depending upon the breaks.

Critical opinion on my films has always been salvaged by what I would call subsequent critical opinion.

Suppose by chance you do get picked up. What have you done? You shot a horse; that isn't first degree murder; in fact, it isn't even murder; in fact, I don't know what it is.

I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.