As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.

I completely take on the risk, the poker game, which being an artist means, and I'm going to try to make a film which honestly reflects what I have in my head.

'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it.

An actor should never be larger than the film he's in.

When it comes to films, people often don't differentiate between the message of a bad central character and the message of the film itself. They are two separate things.

My hope is that people will be repulsed by the character's complete lack of ethics and obsession with consumerism - that's what I was saying about the difference between the character's message and the film's message.

I miss animation very passionately. Not continuously, but every once in a while I would die to do another film.

Film has to describe and show.

I'll be honest with you. My kids don't watch my movies and never have. I can maybe name a film one hand that they've seen, actually, all the way through.

I'd always tried not to worry about the size of the role or the size of the film.

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

I was mostly interested in it as a theatrical film. Personally, I am not so interested in television, simply because I don't watch television myself. I'm into movies.

He considers the theatrical version of Fanny and Alexander an amputated version of what his original film was, and he doesn't really like the shorter film.

I wanted to make Jerusalem as feature film. But we couldn't finance it only through theatrical release, we couldn't get all the money we needed. We had to get some money from television. So we said, ok, let's do it both ways. So we did it in four parts.

It was actually Peter's idea that I should make the film. He called me in the very beginning, and I hadn't even read the book. So I read it and I liked it very much and I knew I'd certainly like to do it.