'Valhalla Rising' is a fusion of my upbringing, basically: everything I grew up loving and wanted to make a film of.

I believe that the constant possibility of failure or possibility of decision-making feeds your creativity.

For 'Drive,' we needed the songs to dictate emotions and really bring you into the mind of The Driver; he's a unique and complicated guy, so the music itself had to be unique and complicated.

I'm a huge admirer of Keanu. I think he's absolutely extraordinary.

My mother and stepfather were documentary filmmakers and, of course, had a very healthy Scandinavian mentality. When it came to cinema, my mother was very obsessed with the French New Wave. That was her generation.

It's hard to always challenge yourself, coming up with new ways to make your life difficult, so when you make something, it becomes more interesting.

There will always be a theatrical experience because there will always be cinemas no matter what. It's like there will always be theaters to have stage plays in.

I find beauty very frightening because it's such an all consuming subject in our society.

The more we become civilized, the more we simultaneously understand our need to be virtuous and our need to understand our experiences on a subconscious level.

I'm not a political filmmaker.

For me, it's all about having the performers feel confident in their movements and surroundings. And then I'll figure out how to photograph it afterward.

I moved to New York when I was eight years old, in 1978. I grew up in Manhattan. I couldn't speak any English, and I had dyslexia, so it took me many years before I could read.

When I was 12 or 13, I started going to the cinema myself.

I wanted to be famous. I guess I thought acting would make me famous.

I'm glamour. I'm vulgarity. I'm scandal. I'm gossip. I'm the future. I'm the counter culture. I'm commercial reality. I'm artistic singularity.

I know how terrifying L.A. can be, because I've been there as a failure. After 'Drive,' it was the most marvellous place in the universe.

America has no one to catch you when you fall. That makes you want to achieve. It is healthy for the soul. But all that is valued is success.

Beauty is like a new class system. The world is so obsessed with beauty; it has been for the last 2,000 years. It's the one stock that's never gone down, the one stock that's never gone out of fashion.

I like extremes.

The greatest artists were in a situation where they had to pay their bills. That's a very convenient way to get very creative very fast.

I'm not a guy's guy. I always loved girl things. I loved dolls. I loved dressing up and much more.

There are wonderful artists who deal in the fashion world only, and you see by their creations that they are changing our understanding of sexuality and freedom and gender-bending.

The most creative phase of a film is in shooting, because structure is the defining element of that phase.

We live in a time where it's very much in vogue, constant search for pure utopian equality, and which, on one level, is quite amusingly silly but also on another probably very important.

When I was 20 years old, my uncle was an arthouse distributor, and he would take me to Cannes every year to work as a film scout.

I started making films purely based on what I would like to see.

I always approach every film I make as if it was going to be the last. So if I'm going to go out, I'm going out with a bang.

Whenever I make a movie, I always try to figure out what kind of music it would be.

I'm not the greatest filmmaker. There are a lot of better filmmakers than me.

Coming to Hollywood, you always hear the horror stories, but I had good people around me who maybe didn't understand what I was doing but always protected me.

The first thing I do when I go to people's houses is look at their television, turn it on.