The obsession required to see a feature through from concept to release is not a rational thing to do with your brief time on this planet. Nor is it something to which an intelligent person should aspire.

We cheer everyone who goes off to Hollywood and tells American stories but telling Australian stories is the greatest thing you can do.

There are a thousand weird untold stories in the Australian film industry, this has been one of them.

Can you imagine what it would be like if all the Aussie film talent was able to make Australian stories?

The obsession required to see a feature through from concept to release is not a rational thing to do with your brief time on this planet. Nor is it something to which an intelligent person should aspire.

So we have to be careful because if you don't protect your culture you won't have it for very long.

Australians don't have a preconceived notion of what things have to be... we can go on a fantastic journey.

My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity.

I kind of worry about that a little bit - we lost our film culture for 30 years because the Americans came in and bought up all the cinema chains and wouldn't show any Australian films.

Three years after starting, by physically doing everything from raising the finance to special effects, we'd finally cobbled together our low budget film.

You go overseas and people are oppressed and scared and worried but we're not like that... we're more like my films and how people come out at the end of seeing them - they feel good.

While the eyes of the world will be on us let's show everyone that we have a great sense of humour.

It was always easy for me. I was born very rich and lucky.

Find your own specific voice in filmmaking and go for it. Either people will get it or they won't and that's what it's all about.

It's because we are so flooded with American culture that we're startled when we see ourselves up there on the screen.

Hollywood is horrible... it's beyond satire.

We've got so many stories to tell, you know, we could take on the world.

Movies are usually difficult, often insane, constantly challenging and always strangely amusing to make.

It's an infinite creative universe to explore so why chase conservative options?

All the jokes in my films, the comedy, they're not me, I just try to hold a big mirror up to us.

I just wanted to do this all Australian film and we didn't want to give creative control to overseas 'cause whoever comes on my sets, whether you're sweeping the floor or an actor, it doesn't matter who comes up with the ideas, it's a collaboration.

I support all Australian films.

Now both my films have been number one at the Australian box office and it took about two years just to get the finance for this film, so if it's hard for me then God help everyone else.

In a kind of a way there's a bit of that happening now so we have to be careful to preserve our culture.

I don't know what it means to be out there against the Olympics.

In 1905 Albert discovered Relativity, in 1906 he invented Rock and Roll.

Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.

Then if your movie clicks with real audiences, you'll be sucked into some sort of Hollywood orbit. It's a devil of a place where the only religion that really counts is box office.

Making your first feature film is actually impossible.

We live in a time where government is not a leadership thing, it's more a business that's out there and running riot, so I guess the people have to go out there and say stuff.

The journey of your first movie is not just beyond belief it can be truly beyond satire.

Getting your screenplay right is the most important thing you'll ever do on your film.

If government and media and all of us in the Australian tribe got together, and the rock industry, we'd just be the greatest cultural force the world has ever seen - we're such an amazing race.

The American formula things are out there but they don't have any stories to tell - we have all the stories to tell - but they're all formula.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.

I do not think that obsession is funny or that not being able to stop one's intensity is funny.

Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.

In America, sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it's a fact.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

I'm a guy who just wanted to see his name in the lineup everyday. To me, baseball was a passion to the point of obsession.

The obsession required to see a feature through from concept to release is not a rational thing to do with your brief time on this planet. Nor is it something to which an intelligent person should aspire.

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.

People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It's very selfish, but it's understandable.

Zac Efron is my obsession, we're the same person. We're not actually here, it's like Janet and Michael Jackson. He just puts on his wig and a dress, and it's me, and you don't know that. It's one of the greatest mysteries of all time.

My hope is that people will be repulsed by the character's complete lack of ethics and obsession with consumerism - that's what I was saying about the difference between the character's message and the film's message.

Love is an obsession. It has that quality to it. But there are healthy obsessions, and mine is one of them.

I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.