At first I tried to give the editors a lot of notes about how I wanted them to put the scene together.

With David Byrne and Talking Heads you had a whole stage full of musicians to cut to, so you were obliged to cut to a certain extent.

With Beloved, I was given the opportunity to have very intense personal feelings about race relations and the state of racial affairs in my country and indeed the world.

As joyful as I was about how Stop Making Sense had turned out, I remember more the horror of what can happen to you in this line of work.

With Robin it was basically 'there he is' - except for when Tim and Denny joined him - and it's just one guy and one guitar. That was challenging.

You finish the day's work and then you go onto dailies and see what you shot yesterday. Usually you go into dailies really tired from the day's work.

Become a film-maker. The more radical people would say, if you can't buy one, steal one, whatever, but just start filming, because then you're a film-maker.

And it went to great pains to enumerate why it was much better than what Warner Brothers had done.

Acting is by far and away the toughest job, in terms of film-making and maybe even the arts. How they do it I don't know, but they have to be allowed to get their satisfaction.