I would love to occasionally do English-speaking films, but the script is as important for me as the director.

Usually, watching yourself is pretty awful. People think we all love watching our own films. We don’t. We cringe away from it.

I am a keen observer of my own films; I also try to discover myself through the movies I make.

I’m part of that generation that grew up watching TV, and being an actor was all about being on TV or being in films.

One of my favorite films is ‘Late Spring’ by Yasujiro Ozu. To me, it represents film as art.

What most people do is they make terrific films, one in three if you’re very lucky, maybe one in five. So you just have to keep on, you have to get through the bad bits.

I categorically resist this idea that films are supposed to be autobiographical and the only stories you tell are about your own life.

With all of my films if I get one bad review and a bunch of good reviews the bad one is the only one that will stay with me, which really sucks!

I have a lot of incomplete short films and incomplete scripts out there.

I was very young, and I was on vacation with my family, and there was a retrospective of old films, and one of them was ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ with Claude Rains that was...

The gritty indie films are a lot rarer than the films that aspire to fill multiplexes.

I am a big scaredy-cat; horror films terrify me.

The best films come about through experimentation.

I see bits and pieces of me in all the characters in my films.

My good films were independent and my bad films were not.

I hate to look at myself in a mirror, and I never go and see films.

If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.

The only fear I have is that I will wake up one day and nobody will allow me to do films. This is a fear every actor has.

I wanted a mix of ‘B’ films and first-class films, because I don’t look down my nose at ‘B’ films. We have a very good collection of Randolph Scott westerns.

Everything makes me nervous – except making films.

Multiplicity was a movie that tested really well. People seeing the movie really liked it, but then the studio couldn’t market it. We opened on a weekend with nine other films.

The theatre has always been voraciously omnivorous. Dramatists have always raided every medium to find grist to their mill: myths, folk tales, newspapers, novels, films, works of art of all kinds.

I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films – although I think they do have plots –...

Films are a part of my being, they don’t define me.

Well the Bombay film wasn’t always like how it is now. It did have a local industry. There were realistic films made on local scenes. But it gradually changed over the years.

Barbara Stanwyck movies drove me nuts, like ‘Ball of Fire’ and ‘Double Indemnity.’ I used to go cuckoo when I would see those films.

I think one of my very favorite films of all time was with Peter Sellers when he played Chauncey, the gardener. Being There.

I like L.A., but I think what’s changed is that the kinds of films I do, the mid-range dramatic film, has become an endangered species.

Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you...

For me, I don’t even like to promote my films but I have to because it’s in the fine print of my contract.

I am really easy to scare, and I don’t enjoy watching spooky films.

To make independent films, you can’t think about them too much, ponder on them too much, get overwhelmed by the enormity of it.

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not...

If I’d lived like my characters, I would have been dead before I’d made 16 films.

I think that films about faith made for faith-based communities have a certain tactic.