“I've always loved the idea of fairy tales, but somehow I never managed to completely connect with them. What interests me is taking those classic images and themes and trying to contemporize them a bit. I believe folk tales and fairy tales have some sort of psychological foundation that makes that possible.”
“People say I pay too much attention to the look of a movie but for God's sake, I'm not producing a Radio 4 Play for Today, I'm making a movie that people are going to look at. ”
“I look at myself as an entertainer, more than anything else. I wanted to make the movie a little more different than the previous films… That was less about me growing as a craftsman. That was more about me trying to provide an element to the audience that I thought they might need something different, that came from a different place.”
“I think that the Internet is going to effect the most profound change on the entertainment industries combined. And we're all gonna be tuning into the most popular Internet show in the world, which will be coming from some place in Des Moines. We're all gonna lose our jobs. We're all gonna be on the Internet trying to find an audience.”
“I cannot just make a film and walk away from it. I need that creative intimacy, and quite frankly, the control to execute my visions, on all my projects.”
“I wanted to make a fake Paris, a Paris of dreams, like in my head when I was twenty and I arrived in Paris for the first time. I wanted to avoid the bad things: traffic jams, dog shit on the street, the rain.”
“Cinema never saved anyone's life, it is not a medicine that will save anyone's life. It is only an aspirin.
There are a few directors that I really loved who made like five, six great movies, but are still shooting and they're not good anymore.”