When I was growing up, I don't remember being told that America was created so that everyone could get rich. I remember being told it was about opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit.

I mean I have a project that I have been wanting to make for quite a while now; and basically, it's a story of my parents growing up in the Lower East Side.

I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.

I go through periods, usually when I'm editing and shooting, of seeing only old films.

People with a lot of money aren't in the business of throwing it away, and those paying footballers' wages, organising parking spaces for dead sharks, and even, dare I say it, buying iPads, are doing it because, for them, it's worth the money.

Whenever it's suggested that our sponsors have some kind of influence or control of what we cover in some kind of censorship through financial pressure, it's rubbish. That's never happened.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

First and foremost I am a drummer. After that, I'm other things... But I didn't play drums to make money.