Actors need bricks to play with, and in fact we rejected all the improvised fragments we had made without a plan. Improvisation without a plan is like tennis without tennis balls.

Visible good easily becomes trite; visually there is very little material left-you know, you make a sunbeam pass over a character or a situation and it becomes far too pathetic and banal.

My transgression, which I have confessed to countless times, that I used stand-ins in the sex-scene is also of a grave nature because it was essential for me to include that effect. Again this means that you are manipulating-that you want to control things.

I think it's important that we all try to give something to this medium, instead of just thinking about what is the most efficient way of telling a story or making an audience stay in a cinema.

I'd toyed with a couple of ideas beforehand, but I hadn't written a single cue, and it was a wonderful feeling to just write away.

Evil gives you far more strings to pull. But I must say that I have never been interested in the psychology of evil, not in the slightest. Perhaps I'm not interested in evil, but in the dark sides of human beings.

Perhaps it sounds pretentious, but in one way or another I hope that you can see that every image contains an idea. It certainly sounds presumptuous-and perhaps it's also untruthful. But as I see it, every image and every cut is thought out. They are not there by chance.

One morning I greeted the cast naked in the front drive and insisted that today was to be a nude day. No, we didn't have any nudity problems.

If you tell a man what to do in real life, to which extent is it reality and to which extent are you in control?