It's a world in which people's motives are questionable and shadowy.

Once I had a potentially heart attack-inducing eight double espressos in one day. I think my assistant secretly swaps my coffees for decaf as she doesn't want me to die of caffeine overdose.

Whenever you experiment with something, it's very easy to take the emotion out of it. And going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.

Stuff I like is getting trashed and stuff that is being praised I think is terrible. I don't really feel in sync with what's happening, but at the same time, what I think keeps me afloat is that I try not to be, and don't want to be, very indulgent. I try to make the films as lean as possible, and to not spend a lot of time crawling up my own ass creatively.

American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.

You got to deal with reviews the same way you deal with your views, which I a long time ago stopped reading because the point is if you believe the good ones you have to believe the bad ones. It's kind of all or nothing.