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You know, it's not the people in Hollywood who go to see movies that will make a movie successful; it's the people all around the country; it's word-of-mouth.

If a movie isn't a hit right out of the gate, they drop it. Which means that the whole mainstream Hollywood product has been skewed toward violence and vulgar teen comedy.

I'm hoping that word-of-mouth on the film - people seeing it and liking it - that that will drive more people to the theaters, because I haven't seen the billboards or the posters or anything.

My films don't have instant impact because they're dense with ideas that people have not thought about. It takes a while for the American public to wrap its head around some of the things I'm saying.

Hollywood is right. A good and strong movie can have a more powerful social impact than any and all political speeches or newspaper editorials and columns.

Unfortunately, overall, movies are a conglomerate. People buy and sell people in this business, which can get really ugly.

I used to love going on a junket and promoting a film when it was not a 24-hour news cycle, and when there weren't so many media outlets. You could actually talk about the film.

There's a lot of vitriolic ranting out there, but there are literally hundreds of critics on the web who care deeply about film and having something to say about it.

The contemporary notion that it's somehow inherently bad for a film to be 'talky' has done grave damage to the culture of American movie-making, enough so that a growing number of people, myself among them, have all but given up on Hollywood.

Marketing has supplanted story as the primary force behind the worthiness of making a film, and that's a very sad thing. It's film only as a function of consumerism rather than as an important component of our culture, and that's everywhere around the world.