The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.

The hardest thing in making a movie is to keep in the front of your consciousness your original response to the material. Because that's going to be the thing that will make the movie. And the loss of that will break the movie.

Sanitised violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.

Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.

A film needs more than you can give it in a lifetime.

I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker-in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business.

Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.