I give the Rogues a mandatory reading list that has nothing to do with cinema. I tell them to read Virgil, Hemingway, the Codex Regius and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, which is wonderfully debased, wild storytelling. I recommend the Warren Commission Report, the official government account of President Kennedy’s assassination, an

There is too much shallow contact in our lives. I prefer to be face to face; I want the person I’m communicating with to be so close I can put my hand on their shoulder. Text messaging is the bastard child handed to us by the absence of reading.

He frequently took me to task when it came to my working methods, insisting it was all becoming stale (“When will the book be ready? Do the five-day version. It needs life! Leave the gaps in it, leave it porous. Shake the structure out and write it. Let’s get the motherfucker over and done with”) and accusing me of being an “endless fiddler”

What does it mean to transform a whole world into music? That’s what opera is about. The idea of staging an opera seemed a strange thing for me to do, until I realised that since my earliest days as a filmmaker I have sought to transform every action, every word into images, so I thought, “Why shouldn’t I try at least once in my life to do the same

Being tossed about on the waves is the very nature of filmmaking, a state of affairs only an amateur would whine about.

My original idea was to go to the southern Sahara and shoot a science-fiction story involving aliens and ancient astronauts from the planet Uxmal in the Andromeda Nebula who arrive on Earth with a camera and film the planet and its inhabitants. They want to prepare a report for folks back home,

I talked Kodak into giving me some raw colour stock for free; it had been returned to them after apparently having been exposed to extreme heat in Africa and was also long beyond its expiration date. Under no circumstances can raw stock like this be sold, though apparently Kodak were interested in discovering if it could survive such

“Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which truth emerges.”

I have never had much choice about what comes next; I just attend to the biggest pressure. I basically have tunnel vision, and when working on a project think of little else.