I'm an artist…and I'm part of every decision in a movie. This is not how they work in Hollywood. There, the director is part of the crew, not the mai… - Pedro Almodóvar

For me today, the most important filmmaker alive, for me personally is Pedro Almodóvar. Because he takes people on the fringes of society and they are bizarre. And If you read about them in the newspapers, you would think they were criminals. But in an Almodóvar film, you forgive them and you even learn to love them, which I think is closer to godliness, than making a film about good people running around.

But it’s one of my worries, I can’t get over it in my mind. I mean, I can’t even reconcile myself to the fact that death is real. Plus I’m an atheist, so I have no belief in the afterlife and no creed to help me out. I see the whole thing as unnatural, I know that sounds odd.” He snorts. “So yes, I’m definitely afraid of dying.

I make fiction films because I like representation. That’s why I don’t make documentaries, and I don’t think I’ll ever make documentaries. The colors of my movies are not completely real, because I like that distance, that this is a movie, and reality is over there. I don’t want to make something that looks completely real. I want a representation of that. And this is what was appealing to me and why I started making movies.