I think of a film as being like a toy train.

It's always more interesting and more difficult to make something positive than negative. To be negative is very easy.

For me, the most important word in cinema is the word freedom. For example, in Europe, we've got freedom, we've got the final cut and that's something which is marvellous.

I like the cinema of people like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton. I am not keen on trying to reproduce reality - for that you should do documentaries.

I believe in imagination. I was a worker when I was 17. Between 17 and 21, I was a worker in the telephone company and imagination saved my life.

It's always been pretty easy for me to exercise my imagination. The other part of the brain, the one that does mathematics, is a nightmare for me. It doesn't work at all.

I've never made any concessions, so I am 100% responsible for my films. This makes me feel very proud.

All day my mind drifts off into fantasies and little stupid jokes.

In the States, I learned to fight for every idea. Sometimes, a director has to be a tyrant to keep the quality.

If you make the right choice in casting, your work is nearly done already. You don't have to spend a lot of time directing the actors, because they're so well suited to the parts.

I like looking back at people's faces in the dark. I like noticing details that no one else sees. But I hate it in the old American movies when drivers don't watch the road.

One grey cloak is much like another, just as all cats are grey in the dark.

The young women in my classes are feisty and clever and believe, often with the passion of youthful optimism, that feminism is a battle already won. I worry for them - and for my daughters, too.

I understand how hard rock fans feel inside out, because I was one of those people.

Wherever you have people, you have factions and disagreements and personality conflicts.

I do kind of transcend the song and give it a different meaning.

A government of laws without men is as visionary as a government of men without laws.

The fact is that you don't want to be away forever, but you want to lead a normal life.

In the end [of the "2012"], there were no ships, no water, no nothing. Only the interiors [were real]. Everything else had to be made, and that is always challenging.

He who fears from near at hand often fears less.

One of the main purpose of art has ever been that of making its indispensable contribution to the growth of entropy of the universal stupidity.