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

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.

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.

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

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.

If we pray we shall put an end to evil intentions.

The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love.

You never know what you can do until you try, and very few try unless they have to.

... a widespread secularization increasingly descends into a moral, intellectual, and spiritual nihilism that denies not only the One who is the Truth but the very idea of truth itself.

Not a chance. I don't know what Sarah (Palen)'s doing, (but) I have no desire to be president of the United States, zero desire. I don't think that I would be electable.

We have gaps that are rooted in systemic racism.

Outside, a ceiling of pearly gray clouds coalesced over Manhattan, and the apartment had grown dark. It just keeps dripping. It's been like this all week, .. Rain would be a relief.

I had to trick people into giving me money for my first film. Making a romantic comedy is easier and more expected from a woman than it is to make a drama about a Japanese warrior.

I think every character I play has a physicality to them, so I have to stay in some sort of shape. I'll never be a size two. And I don't want to be a size two.

Radio broadcasting was only 25 years old when I was born in 1932.