If somebody says there’s an art picture – I don’t want to go! They usually mean it’s beautifully shot, or they used certain techniques, or it’s about loneliness, an empty room with beautiful lighting. And somebody walks through and you hear some eerie music. Very few things come out of the people themselves or their own frustrations. I’m not a highbrow or an intellectual. I’m a street person. I just really believe that all the things that I can think everybody else can feel. I’m not shooting through rainbows or glasses or anything like that, just taking life and saying what is my problem. The greatest thrill for me is that an uneducated person like me can look at the film we make and understand we were making it for him. It aggravates me when people say, ‘You make intellectual films.’ I’m not an intellectual!

Yet I believe in art. I believe in it in the movies, in music and in fine art, where it can become a great investment. What’s all this about certain stories being commercial and others not? People in the movies should go on strike for quality, not money. In this country we’re not really in love with films, are we? I mean, we’re really in love with some kind of attitudes to success, and it’s a sad truth because then there doesn’t seem to be room for the students of film. That’s a sad commentary, not on the greed, but on the numbers game and on the new art of American life, the only all-consuming art, the art of business. So that supposing you don’t want to be in that art, you want to be in another art – of self-expression – then there’s no outlet.