As a performer, I'm constantly fascinated with the idea of being able to know what anybody else's experience is, and how misleading all informatives, like appearance, can be.

I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves. Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place.

I was not, and am not, officially a producer of that film [I am love] but the work of what a producer does I learned at that stage and to a certain extent I've been a producer ever since.

Eleven years is a great length of time to prepare a movie, it would be wonderful to have 11 years of funded preparation.

I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.

I think that film festivals, we're very often given to understand, are about filmmakers and about films and about the industry of filmmaking. I don't believe that they are, I believe that film festivals are about film audiences, and about giving an audience the encouragement to feel really empowered and to stretch the elastic of their taste.

There are many graphic artists who have interpreted The Ancient One as a Tibetan Buddhist Lama, we're kind of shifting that a bit. We're trying not to be fixed, we're trying not to be fixed to any one thing, any one gender, any one spiritual discipline, and any one race even; we're just trying to wing it beyond that. So it's a new gesture really, just another interpretation.