Every documentary is subjective. It's a total lie to say there are objective documentaries.

I don't think the concept of "directing actors" exists in the sense that if you get what you order from an actor you'll always get bad acting. Every actor is scared just like a regular person.

The cinematography was of course incredibly important to me because I graduated as a cinematographer.

It's said that if two documentary filmmakers meet they talk about the world, if two fiction filmmakers meet they talk about the million that they don't have to make their film.

I think that too often we, film directors, think that a big epic novel and feature film are the same. It's a lie. A feature film is much closer to a short story actually.

At 13 I was someone that didn't have a personality yet. It's a fascinating period in a human life. It's so exciting because you are in between childhood and adulthood.

There is one thing where people are always right. It is when they are describing what they have been feeling when watching your film. You cannot say: No, you did not feel like that!

I went to England when I was 13-years=old and then I went again when I was 14. When I went for the second time I felt like the first summer I was there it was a waste because I didn't exist yet.

You give your film away to the audience once it's done. I never look at my films after the premier. The film needs to start its own history.

I had worked in fiction a lot before I started making documentaries, but when I was around 32 or 33-years-old I suddenly got so fed up with the world of fiction, which is so money-centered.

In all my documentaries I did all the camera work, but in fiction I didn't want to do it myself. I think the machinery is so heavy and demanding that you would leave the actors alone for a long time.

Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist ei

The universe, they say, depended for its operation on the balance of four forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty, and bloody-mindedness.

Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly.

You will never be fully resigned to the will of God if you are troubled by human opinion of you, or if you make for yourself a little idol of what people say.

[The Freedom of Information Act is] the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored.

I'm a little more measured. That sense of urgency I thought accompanied things - it can take a little longer. You have to take the long view.

The thing I miss the most about Scotland is the football.

Love and war, it seemed, worked by the same rules. One had to hurry, before the fires flared out.

People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller.

The pursuit of pleasure must be the goal of every rational person.