Without dreams, there can be no courage. And without courage, there can be no action.

Whoever came up first with that saying a picture is worth a thousand words didn't understand the first thing about either one.

It's almost scary how stylish things can look if you take the color out - how much more you see the essence of things and how much more something can appear elegant.

In the late 1980s the amount of German films was down to four or five percent of the market, and the remaining 95 percent were American. It is now 20 to 30 percent German productions.

Maybe it's the music that enables them to function like that, to always take everything as it comes and never complain about the misery, hardship or injustice.

The Cuban people have an amazingly strong and unbroken spirit.

For years all I seemed to be doing was lobbying politicians and others to persuade them that European culture needed movies, and that we had to protect it.