I had become a film director because I thought I could express something in an artful way.

Everything you have heard about the shower scene is true.

The best times I had on film sets were the times the director let me express myself, but those were rare.

Doing fashion drawings was the only way I had to express myself when I was a teenager.

It pulled me like a magnet, jazz did, because it was a way that I could express myself.

Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.