Hollywood is horrible... it's beyond satire.

Then if your movie clicks with real audiences, you'll be sucked into some sort of Hollywood orbit. It's a devil of a place where the only religion that really counts is box office.

My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity.

Australians don't have a preconceived notion of what things have to be... we can go on a fantastic journey.

In a kind of a way there's a bit of that happening now so we have to be careful to preserve our culture.

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.

The American formula things are out there but they don't have any stories to tell - we have all the stories to tell - but they're all formula.

Find your own specific voice in filmmaking and go for it. Either people will get it or they won't and that's what it's all about.

We cheer everyone who goes off to Hollywood and tells American stories but telling Australian stories is the greatest thing you can do.

All the jokes in my films, the comedy, they're not me, I just try to hold a big mirror up to us.

So we have to be careful because if you don't protect your culture you won't have it for very long.

They said I was a valued customer, now they send me hate mail.

Prove it. I'll measure your words against your actions, and from that I will determine your worth.

One King means peace.

Communism everywhere has paid the price of rigidity and dogmatism. Freedom has the strength of compassion and flexibility. It has, above all, the strength of intellectual honesty.

When I really need it, talking is the best way to deal with emotional pain.

So many self-help ideas are like meringue - you take a big bite, and there's nothing there.

Happy and thrice happy are those who enjoy an uninterrupted union, and whose love, unbroken by any sour complaints, shall not dissolve until the last day of their existence.

If the media didn't know I played chess, there'd be no angle on me at all.

I don't know why it is, but I do like dancing in the extreme situations. I like that noise, I like that intensity. For some reason, it's what I respond to in terms of my taste and of my instincts.

Edward [Weston] was the first artist - and I don't use the word lightly - to make a living doing art photography. Other photographers did commercial work, or worked for the government.