I want to make a film about a factory worker.

No one is asking what happened to all the homeless. No one cares, because it's easier to get on the subway and not be accosted.

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

Well, you have to keep your faith in the fact that there are a lot of intelligent people who are actively looking for something interesting, people who have been disappointed so many times.

I did The Newton Boys and during the whole process of making the film, I may have spent a week in Los Angeles.

I always sensed instinctively from the earliest age that I was being lied to.

Hollywood has a way of sucking the world's talent to it.

I do find myself at the moment, due to the success of School of Rock, to be on people's radar a little.

I've always liked the minds of criminals, they seem similar to artists.

I worked offshore as an oil worker for a couple of years.

I want to make a film about a factory worker.

I think there are more films being made, but there are probably less outlets for them and distributors.

I've never been a guy who had more than a toe in Hollywood anyway, so my toe is more easily lopped off than most.

The worst thing is that you used to be able to show interesting films on campuses. Those places are all gone.

It's luck that one thing works out and one doesn't, it's sort of happenstance.

I think I got really lucky with Slacker. That was a film that probably shouldn't have been seen.

I think you get in trouble if you make experimental big studio films.

Yes, but Hollywood is the strangest place in that they'll torpedo their own film to prove an emotional point.

Everyone is encouraged to see their lives, the world through the eyes of the rich.

Something about Texas I'm not proud of is that our state murdered 37 people last year alone.

Before Sunrise did very well internationally. It made as much in Italy and Korea as it did here.

Whatever story you want to tell, tell it at the right size.

I lost a year or two in there, trying to get films financed that I didn't know would never get financing.

It's disappointing to see films become pure entertainment, so that it's not an art form.

The truth will only be told over a career.

Filmmakers are going to make films, just like painters are going to paint.

At some point youre no longer growing up youre aging. But no one can pinpoint that moment exactly.

Filmmakers are going to make films just like painters are going to paint.

As you get older, you want less from the world; you just want to experience it. Any barriers to feeling emotions get dismantled. And ordinary things become beautifully poetic.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

I was lucky enough to occasionally break out of that racist situation that prevails in the Hollywood film production community. But it was racist then and it will always be that way. It will never be otherwise.

'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it.

Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.

It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.

To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.

I mean when the play was on in New York I was starting to get film offers coming through, and since the film's come out I get offered more than I used to, but it happens incrementally.

I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.

I like doing them and they're ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don't have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They're really fun, I want to make more of them definitely.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.

The best thing I can think of would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films and a criticism of the status quo. That's my dream, to make such a German film.

If he didn't fall in love he would have never come back near the end of the film. Because, what man is going to dishonor himself so that he comes back in front of the man that took a woman away from him... and warns her to save her life?

Robert Altman's Nashville is my all-time favorite film because it covers all the bases - it's original, moving, and has something to say, but also funny and incredibly entertaining.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I have a movie coming out called Spun, which will be at the Toronto Film Fest.

Well ironically my last three roles have all been a mother. One was a Canadian film where the baby was taken away because she is a drug addict, in Irish Jam I play a mother to a four year old. I think in the future I'll be able to handle the role with a lot more depth.

And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.

A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.

My advice to young film-makers is this: don't follow trends, start them!