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The artistic element of Manhattan has kind of moved to Brooklyn. Has it changed it? Yeah. Has it ruined it? I would say no. It is what it is. I say better that than an urban war zone.

All of the films that I've made are about the country I live in and grew up in... And I think if you're going to put an artist's eye to it, you're going to put a critical eye to it. I've always been interested in the gray area that exists between the black and white, or the red and blue, and that's where complexity lies.

The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.

When movies first came out, maybe they were in black and white and there wasn't any sound and people were saying the theater is still the place to be. But now movies and theater have found their own place in the world. They are each legitimate art forms.

A lot of British actors will look at America as such a land of opportunity. In England, there's such a small pool of working actors of color. There's such a small amount of work that is actually produced in the first place.

Entertainment came out of this thing called a television, and it was gray. Most of the films that we saw at the cinema were black and white. It was a gray world. And music somehow was in color.

Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.

I think I got disappointed over the years about New York, about the States. You know, sometimes you go and visit Europe and see good old socialism in its good part! You see public concern about art, and young people's participation and young faces in the audience.

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city's magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.