When I was growing up in the Forties and Fifties, you could hide your children from the difficulties of life, but today you can't separate children's contact with the adult world today.

It is the child's understanding that teaches the adults the way of the future. They're still doing it today with modern technology.

A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

You get to about 65 or 70 and you lose friends and the world does seem to be an endlessly difficult place and tragic place, so it's more and more difficult for me to find the bright lights.

When you're a kid, and someone's an artist, you think of Leonardo da Vinci. You don't think that's a job; you just think of a man with a beard, painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

You've only got to look at a film to see that it has to be collaborative - the images, the performances and all the art direction and the costume, everything shrieks collaboration.

I really have a lot of respect for music, the art form of music. It's my whole life. I don't care about any of that other stuff. And I have always felt that way. I'll build a career on my own merits, my own hard work and nothing else.

I just love sitting in a theater watching a film and the grain is like boiling and it feels completely alive like an organism almost; like an organism made out of light.