There are still 500,000 persons afflicted with leprosy in Latin America, so it is still very much present.

Also, I knew that the impact of Motorcycle Diaries was going to be so resonant for all of us who went through the experience of making it that I didn't want to do anything that could reflect it.

The Sundance Institute has been vital to the film communities of Latin America.

No, I worked a lot for European television, doing documentaries in Brazil.

Also, there are now new laws in Brazil which create incentives for Argentine and Latin American films to be premiered and distributed in Brazil and vice versa.

The films that I've done before were original stories most of the time, I did two adaptations before this, but they were mostly original stories where I had complete freedom to evolve in the direction I wanted.

I'm much more interested in living specific experiences in films.

So the search for a father in Central Station is also a search for a country.

So when I was very young, I longed for Brazil.

It was a complex endeavor so without Robert Redford's constant support we wouldn't have gotten to the end.

The Peruvian faces are completely different from that faces in Argentina and in Brazil.

And my generation in Brazil was influenced by Cinema Novo. So we're echoing what's been done way in the past.

I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films.

So I feel a responsibility to help first-time film-makers in Brazil, but also to increase the dialogue between film cultures which are really wonderful and so much closer to us than what we do see on our screens.

On the contrary, I'm a strong believer in the necessity of imperfection coming into the film.

I come from Brazil, which is a Portuguese speaking part of the continent.

I went to Cuba maybe eight or nine times.

That's why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think.

We all knew the book well because it's the cult book in Latin America. For me, this was a sacred territory. I would not have ventured into it by myself.

The other aspect is that you become much more aware of the structural problems that pertain to that continent. You feel the need to act to try and solve them.

My father was a diplomat for part of his life and I jumped from country to country and culture to culture.

The necessity to conceptualise has to come very early on, and defining a vector of development for that film also at the beginning of the process will allow you much more freedom as you go along.

There are still 500,000 persons afflicted with leprosy in Latin America, so it is still very much present.

A filmmaker can never be distant from his roots.

When I come to London, I always like to see what's playing at the NFT.

But I also think that the more you reason collectively about what the project should be at the beginning of the process, the more you can improvise later.

I come from a country and also a continent whose identity is in the making. We're a very young culture, and I think that things are not yet crystallised.

An isolationist America is no bloody use to anyone.

My focus is that firearms are handled safely and that we can continue to enjoy them here in North America.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.

Who cares about that stuff? This is America, not Jerusalem. I'm an American. Let Harry be a Jew.

Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.

The only time I would like to see was the 20s and 30s in America because I love the music and the style and the optimism, I wanted to see New York being built. I wanted to see all that, you know.

I'm about to become a member of the Chemists Society of America. I'm very proud of that.

It's a cyclical thing. When they make one, everyone loves them. Different genres come around in succession. People always welcome the western. It's America's genre.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

If we can just take a few companies, and use those as models, as examples, to show the rest of corporate America how they can become more competitive, that's what I'd like to do and that's what I hope to do.

The surest way to return to the people's business is to listen to the people themselves: We need to drop this whole scheme of federally controlled health care, start over, and work together on real reforms at the state level that will contain costs and won't leave America trillions of dollars deeper in debt.

Gary Smith, when I came to America, taught me a great deal about racing.

You know, nobody eats in England. Three or four pints of English beer a night fills you. I can't say I'm very impressed with the food in America. it's all sort of bland. Like turkey sandwiches.

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

I've always thought that if Israel really wanted to solve the problem, they'd just start tomorrow and push right to the Jordan River, and anything in their way goes. They don't need America or someone else to help.

These old ballparks are like cathedrals in America. We don't have big old Gothic cathedrals like they do in Europe. But we got baseball parks.

American and Israel share a special bond. Our relationship is unique among all nations. Like America, Israel is a strong democracy, a symbol of freedom, and an oasis of liberty, a home to the oppressed and persecuted.

All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.

From the long range point of view, I do not know of anything we can do more important than to make some contribution to the preservation of religion as a vital force in America.

Our alliances and our credibility are crucial elements of our working capital in advancing America's interests in the world, and they have been eroded over the last four years.

In America it's live by the sword of freedom of expression and be will to die by it as well.