"I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters."

"I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do."

"When Silence of the Lambs did well commercially it was more than anything. My partner Ed Saxon and I were just so relieved that finally we had made a movie that had made some money!"

"I was a sort of rock journalist - whatever that is - in London in the late '60s."

"I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films."