I am a product of my failures.

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.

I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.

I am somebody who creates images, with my perspectives, fascinations and my instincts as a narrator. You have to activate the audience's imagination. If you are just giving them scientific results, they would forget the film in five minutes flat.

I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that.

I do other sorts of things. I act in other people's movies. I direct operas. I write books.

But the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live.