Quotes

I much prefer to find those characteristics that seem to resist culture, history and education. In other words the common denominators, which unites us rather than separates us as human beings.

[about late British folk singer Kirsty MacColl] This is a low-budget film, and we didn't have money to pay her. But she said she'd really always wanted to sing that song "Sail Away" by Randy Newman, so she just came and set up the microphones and sung it for us.

[on Beautiful People (1999)] I wanted to make a film about people who have so much to say and they don't know how to do it. I love to make stories and films where you actually combine things in a way that you usually wouldn't, that you see things slightly from a different perspective.

Anyone who wants to make a film should learn their craft through the Russian silent classics, through Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein. This is where you learn how to capture ambiance and lyricism. Where you learn how to construct a film at the cutting table.

When you enter a new culture, you're a bit like a teenager, you start learning again. You're extremely sensitive, and you absorb everything.

Playing with meanings is very 60s, I like that. Toying around is easier for an outsider like me.

Everyone says things like, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky were an influence, or I saw Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) and I knew I had to be a filmmaker,' or 'My mum is an actress, and I grew up in that kind of environment.' (...) I said, 'Look. All I need is that camera and that footage.'

[on his beginnings] I used to write stories at school and the teacher would read them out in class. One day she put them in for a big competition and I won. I did a little book of cartoons in my room and then I was encouraged to make a film of it. The great thing about communism was that every town had to have a film club even if it was considered an empty good-for-nothing place. That's where me and my older friend began making our films. First an animation, then a documentary, and so on. My father, who has a notoriously dry sense of humor, refused to be impressed by all the prizes we won and told me I should be out getting into trouble on the street rather than living in a fantasy world in my room.

I believe in imaginative literature and imaginative art because imaginative work can tell you far more than any factual work can do. Whether it is literature, theatre or cinema what it always boils down to is an engrossing story that weaves reality and fantasy into far bigger picture.

I like it when the ordinary and the extraordinary go hand in hand. For me, laughter and tears are two sides of the same coin.