Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

It's important that a film is loud and I hope many people agree. You should be inside of a film when you go into a theater. It should surround you, envelope you, so you can live inside a dream.

I've seen my own blood and broken a few bones. I've been hit, which isn't an entirely bad thing, as at least you have a glimpse of the suffering endured by the people you are photographing. And in a sense, crumbling empires and war have been with me all my life.

When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn't acting. It's following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that. So the director's task is just that – to direct, to point the way. Then the actor takes over. And he must be allowed the space, the freedom to express himself in the role. Without that space, an actor is no more than an unthinking robot with a chest-full of push-buttons.

The process I go through in the art and the architecture, I actually want it to be almost childlike. Sometimes I think it's magical.

If there is such a thing for Sparks as a mission statement, it's more general in that we want each new album to be musically and lyrically provocative. We want to really go at it as though this might be the first album that anyone will ever hear of Sparks.