I think people should be given a test much like driver's tests as to whether they're capable of being parents!
Cinema is all about going back from shadow to light and back and forth: cinema is a place of transgression.
The landscape is a reflection of the inner life. Since I can't shoot the inner life, all I can shoot is the exterior but I know that when I'm filming outside, I'm filming inside. I can only really touch the inside through the mise-en-scene. So through the mise-en-scene of the outside we can explore the inside
The United States is such a potent political, cultural, and economic model in the evocation of the contemporary world, that to come here, select some elements from the prototype and rearrange them, that's really interesting artistically.
The more elaborate your narrative, the more the spectator shuts up and listens obediently. And if the filmmaker keeps quiet, the spectator will himself project his own assumptions and sentiments onto the screen.
There is no god. I am an atheist. It is up to us to become God. We need to be elevated, to become saints. God alienates people from themselves.
I like the idea of challenging Hollywood on its own turf. It's important to do that.
I think that storytelling and creation are very close to what the center of what magic is about. I think not just for me, but for most of the cultures that have had a concept of magic, then the manipulation of language, and words, and thus of stories and fictions, has been very close to the center of it all.
When the US withdrew their troops from Somalia, I recall making a comment that [in] the way the peacekeepers had been withdrawn from Somalia, the impression had been given that the easiest way to unravel a peacekeeping operation is to kill a few soldiers.
I'm very involved in the writing on every level.
One of the principals of composition, I would say, in fiction, is you want to do what you can do a lot of. You want to do what you're enthusiastic about and what rings your bell. In this case, almost every decision I made was on that basis.