Get Carter is a classic, but it did nothing in the United States. It came out on a double bill with a Frank Sinatra western.

I can work in London. A British journalist asked me if I had any trouble working with an English crew, as an American, and I said I might have if I was from Scotland, but I'm from Massachusetts, which is sort of Oxfordshire, but more intellectual. That's kind of unforgivable but you've got to let them have it.

I don't think the latest Star Wars pictures have any artistic intentions, but the original picture opened up epic science fiction.

When I was a kid in London there was just something about the light and there's something about the way London went onto film in those days, whether it was Technicolor or Technicolor plus the flatness of the light, or whatever.

You just have to know what you want and what you're doing and it leads to a kind of general well-being, which I think you sensed when you were there.

I don't like scripts leaking. On the other hand, the more real attention a script gets, the better.

Yeah, well I can't see a situation where I wouldn't at least re-write as a director something I was going to direct. At the moment, I wouldn't direct anything that I hadn't written. I can now say, as everybody else says, that it all depends on the script.