My experience creatively is different than my experience in life, for, as my father would say, the simple reason that you can't get hurt when everything goes wrong creatively.

I don't like to meet the actor and have a lot of conferences and talk about their sub-life and their off-screen life and their back stories and all that nonsense, because it never means anything.

I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.

There's something about my films; they're informed by my sensibility. I have the same preoccupations, the same interests... there's just something in the nuance, and so you always know it's a film of mine whether I sign my name to it or not.

A general philosophy of the female characters in my films is they all want something to believe in, and not having anything.

I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.

I'd like to make a great movie. I've made many movies. I think I've made some good movies, but I never felt I've made a great movie.