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European films were what it was about for me - the sensations I needed, the depth, the storytelling, the characters, the directors, and the freedom that you can't really find in American films.

When I say that I am going to do an American film, I didn't want to suddenly go off into a completely different world that which bears no relation to the style of filmmaking that I'm used to.

I loved American filmmakers when I was growing up. I didn't get to film school or anything. I was a very bad student. I just devoured film, but there was a point in my teens when I started to run a little film society.

Where I come from, it was a heresy to say you wanted to be in movies, leave alone American movies.

I must say, to my great surprise and pleasure, I deeply loved making movies in the United States because of all the opportunities it gave me to work with people that I admire as artists.

I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me.

I was sick and tired of being an English actor who did a lot of American movies because I was cheap and good.

I came to Hollywood and I loved it. It was a great time, but in my head I was still elsewhere, in Europe. I believed in a certain cinema, which I still do believe in - a certain European cinema - and as a young woman being in America, I thought I was being taken away from that.

I wanted to make Canadian films, and I ended up making American films.