My first film as an actor was 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High ' a glorious experience that spoiled me for future films.

The action films I will make in the future will be more believable and character-based. I am now on my second cycle of fame and I want to make films that smell real and are truthful.

It seems like the studios are either making giant blockbusters or really super-small indies. And the mid-level films I grew up on like 'Back to the Future' and all those John Hughes movies the studios aren't doing. It's hard to get them on their feet.

Hollywood films have become a cesspool of formula and it's up to us to try to change it... I feel like a preacher! But it's really true. I feel personally responsible for the future of American cinema. Me personally.

When I was a kid I thought movie stars were women and men who were in these great films that we still look at now. But I don't think there are too many films coming out these days that we're going to look at in the future and say 'This is one of the great ones.'

It's funny: I've been very successful and done a lot of films and I don't really have an agent - I don't really pursue jobs I let people come to me.

I like all Jim Carrey films. They're really funny.

It's funny though with films because you can incorporate a variety of elements and sometimes that can work for you and sometimes I think it can work against you.

Working with Chaplin was very amusing and strange. His films are so funny but working with him I found him to be a very serious man. Whereas the films of Hitchcock are macabre he could be a very funny man to work with always telling jokes and holding court. Of course when I worked with Charlie he was getting older.

When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema its violence its naivety the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films violence is made consumable.

'Funny Games' was conceived as a provocation. My other films are different. If people feel my other films are or respond to them as provocation then that's quite different. 'Funny Games' is the only one of mine where my intention was to provoke the audience.

I mean I've seen 3D films so far and I think it's a long way to go before they replace actors. It's a funny thing with 3D I haven't quite got it yet. Yet.

If my films make one more person miserable I'll feel I have done my job.

I have a love interest in every one of my films: a gun.

My films are always concerned with family friendship honor and patriotism.

Watching John Lasseter's films I think I can understand better than anyone that what he's doing is going straight ahead with his vision and working really hard to get that vision into film form. And I feel that my understanding this of him is my friendship towards him.

But short films are not inferior just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait or a poem.

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems needing freedom trying to find a way to cut themselves loose but failing to rid themselves of conscience a sense of sin the whole bag of tricks.

There have been nine Super Bowls in New Orleans and not all of them have brought the best of luck to NFL Films. We got robbed twice there got food poisoning and my hotel room was broken into on the day the Bears played the Patriots in January 1986.

I am a filmmaker. That is all I've ever been. You know Martin Scorsese makes films about the mob. And I make movies about food.

It's very difficult to break into motion pictures but it's oddly easier for directors today because of independent films and cable who have inherited for the most part those films of substance that the studios are reluctant to finance.

I turn up in Los Angeles every now and then so I can get some big money films in order to finance my smaller money films.

In Australia they set up a special fund to kick films off. It was quite an enlightened sort of move. You could go to this government bureau with scripts and and get finance for films.

There were a lot of people dreaming about making films and they would finance maybe 6 films a year. Because they were funded by the government the films sort-of had to deal with serious social issues - and as a result nobody went to see those films.