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.
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.
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.
I believe in free education, free healthcare. But I do not believe in equality.
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.
I always, as a firm rule, make my movies based on how inexpensively I can make them because that means the more freedom I'm going to have.
Oh, I love L.A. It's not so much about Hollywood. I love everything in L.A.
