I'm one of the few reading and thinking people who loves Las Vegas for the vulgarity and omnipresence of the dream. The collective dream. There's something enormous about it. Let me say one thing: Las Vegas and cinema have similar roots. The country fair. The magician at the country fair. The vulgarity of the country fair.

It was a subject [ volcanoes] that was dormant in me for a long time and it popped up 40 years ago when I made a [short] film on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe about a volcano that was about to explode and a single farmer refused to leave ["La Soufrière"].

The punishment itself is something I respectfully disagree with, but for thousands and thousands of years it was practiced everywhere.

I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.

I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.

Roger Ebert was the last mammoth alive who was holding the flag for real movies and moviemakers.

I do not believe in the Cinema verite. Sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth.