My belief is that no movie, nothing in life, leaves people neutral. You either leave them up or you leave them down.

At its best, cinema does retain a remarkable ability to speak to people of every age, from every background, and in ways that almost any other art form in popular culture struggles to compete with.

I'm not naive enough to pretend that on its own cinema can capture the very soul of significant social and cultural problems.

I absolutely refuse to accept the fact that any country in the world goes into a kind of film-making crisis. What happens is they lose confidence, they lose focus and the young film-makers of any particular generation can very easily get lost in that mix. It's happened in Italy, happened in France, happened in the U.K. during my lifetime.