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It's always good to have no expectations when you see a film. Then you can be pleasantly disappointed or surprised.

Fortunately or not, expectations are always high for all my films.

I'm amazed that movies ever get finished at all - much less come out good once in a while. It's an awful lot of work and it can go wrong a thousand different ways.

Movies are great fun and wonderful when they're good. But you never get to see them till six months after they're finished. So you never get a sense of whether they're really well liked or how good they are. And you don't really know what the finished product is going to be like, because it's a director's medium.

When you work so hard on making a film, it's all worthwhile when you get to experience seeing that film with an audience who thoroughly enjoy it and react to the movie.

And as a filmmaker, I'm trying to unhook myself from this idea that unless you have a brilliant, long, enormously lucrative theatrical run, that your movie somehow failed. And I don't believe that.

I don't know what to expect out of my films. My first two films were with extremely talented directors, and they didn't work. And my next two films were with newcomers, and they worked well. So I've stopped expecting anything from my movies.

A lot of films come out before they're finished.

So many things have to come together to get a creatively successful and financially successful film. Sometimes you'll have a movie that you're very proud of, and you think it transcended all of your expectations, but it doesn't come out at the right time. I have done movies that have never been released. That can be depressing.

When you make a film like this, you must have the highest expectations of your audience. Having worked in situations where we have the lowest expectations of our audience.