Making films is much more difficult than people imagine, and so the experience of actually directing them is not one I've ever relished.

I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.

One wants to be able to experience being other people, remaking a reality, remaking a life, remaking a certain world.

The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.

Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.

You can be moderate in a way and still intense in your views. It's the extremism that gets frightening; religious fundamentalism and wacko-left liberalism is crazy.

Every film I've made has a kind of frustrated love story in the center of it. They were people who saw life from opposing points of view, which has been in every film I've ever done. It had all the ingredients of the kinds of films I like to do.