If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it's simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it's a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place.

We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.

You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn't mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that's what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia.

Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it's not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it's not your fault.

I don't care whether the person is guilty or not guilty. It's not my business to establish guilt or innocence. It's a court of law that does that and a jury does that, but not me.

One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.

I prefer to be alive, so I'm cautious about taking risks.