I don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.

The first time I ever thought about doing a film seriously, I was in London. I was about 17 years old. I was just standing in the street, a bit dazzled by an Antonioni bus wipe, which by the way are inherent in London, and I imagined a film set in London starting out with the riff from The Yardbird's "Heart Full of Soul", and now, how ever many years later, I've done it.

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays.

I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.

I'm more from a double world where I wasn't part of anything or invested in anything, because I was Irish, and very Irish, but also the other part of my family, not that it had airs, or money, was descended from the first minister on Cape Ann in the 1620s.

I'd been working so hard making the film that I hadn't even emotionally processed the fact that I was a director.

Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.