The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.

The reality of the final moment, just before shooting [the scene], is so powerful that all previous analysis must yield before the impressions you receive under these circumstances, and unless you use this feedback to your positive advantage, unless you adjust to it, adapt to it and accept the sometimes terrifying weaknesses it can expose, you can never realize the most out of your film.

What do you take me for? A fourteen karat sucker?

There are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating than seeing someone else die.

There's something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.

How does anybody ever think of anything?

It's a passion when you're doing it for other people and you're doing it for the people around you making the film and the people who are going to see the film, and the giving. When you start thinking about you doing it for some sort of self-gain, then I think it becomes an obsession. It becomes a negative experience.