It never crossed my mind to make a film about Muhammad Ali or the Queen or any of them! They just come out of the blue.

The only way you can learn about making films is by making them, by putting your stamp on the thing.

Audiences arent fools - their judgement really is important. And the true heroes of films are the investors. They take the risk, after all.

To be successful at anything, you need the right to fail, not just occasionally.

There's the physical life and the voice, but at some point you abandon all of that, you know what the spirit of the person is and you let it descend and just get on with it.

I teach film directing, inasmuch as you can. Its not really possible to teach film direction, but I sit there as a sort of testimony of experience and know-how, I suppose.

As a director, my job is to protect. I protect scripts, actors, cameramen, designers.

It is not aloofness, superiority. It’s a protection. Who in this ravaged battlefield doesn’t want to gather close her comrades?

Why go for something cold and dead, when you can have something hot and panting?

My critique of democracy begins and ends with this point. Kids must be educated to disrespect authority or else democracy is a farce.

I tend to have a very analytical mind, I'm constantly thinking about how things can be better or different.

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.

The Banh Mi sandwich is really the only good argument for colonialism.

Life is never straightforward or emotionally black and white.

I don't need too much. Glamour and all that stuff don't excite me. I am just glad I have the game of basketball in my life.

When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.

I feel like so many people get into that place where creating for someone else is selling out and it is so not about that. It is a stupid, kind of pretentious way of thinking.