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To have a film in America means precisely nothing if you don't have a distributor who stands behind it.

The corporate system dictates what gets made, and the movies are so bad because of the economic structure of Hollywood. The big business takeover of Hollywood is at fault rather than American storytellers - it's what keeps textured movies from getting made.

Foreign revenues are tremendously important, but foreign audiences are dying for American movies, not for films they could make themselves.

The American movie, in part because America's a melting pot, the cultural hodgepodge that America makes, generates movies that have appeal across all international boundaries. And that's really not true for most domestic film industries. It's no longer true of France and Italy, less true than it used to be of the U.K.

There's an abundance of exposure when you start working in American films. Inevitably you become a brand and that has to be controlled.

Awards were made in Hollywood, in whatever the time it was created. They're to promote each other's movies. You give me an award, I give you an award and people will believe that we are great movies and they'll go to see them. It's still the same.

I'm less comfortable making American movies because I don't know them so well.

I find the stuff that is exciting to me are the films coming out of Taiwan and Iran and France. So I have the feeling I'm not making the films that American distributors want to make.

Promotions are the worst part of making a movie. We are actors and not salesmen. Still, you have to go to so many places to try and sell the movie.

The BAFTAs give the British point of view, and the Oscars give the American point of view, but the truth is we're all working in an international industry.