“When you’re in theater or the circus or film – to me it’s all one – affairs happen. People fall in love.”

Opera was the cinema of its time, so to bring back that popular appeal, you just need to unleash its visceral immediacy and excitement. Most productions don’t manage that – but when an opera does do it, you never forget it.

Look, I had a passion for comic books growing up.

Having grown up far, far away in a small country town in Australia, I was only slightly aware of hip-hop.

When I was growing up you would see big American films that really mythologised their landscape, that really showed the vastness and the drama of their country.

The race is long but in the end it is only with YOURSELF.

There’s a whole system in Hollywood where the director never speaks to the studio, but I like to engage them in a discussion. I listen.

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn’t make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

I wouldn’t take a directing job if I didn’t think it was enriching life.

I really believe musical form will go on. There’s got to be a way of making musical form in cinema live again.

So, what is creative freedom? We can make what we want, how we want. The only constraint is: not for any budget.

One of the great things about Sydney is that it has a great acceptance of everyone and everything. It’s an incredibly tolerant city, a city with a huge multicultural basis.

I’ve always loved the old epics that tell a simple emotional story, whether it’s the tumultuous relationship between Rhett and Scarlett or Lawrence of Arabia’s passion to get lost in a faraway place.

I always have a point of view. It may not be right, but it’s my own.

I am always worried when someone says, ‘This is perfect.’

Advice is a form of nostalgia.

I never see things I make in the same way that the audience does. You can never do that.

Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus.

I worked the circus, carnival, I had my own medicine show, I worked 18 years of radio.

One should go to the circus, beyond any question of fashion, at least one or two times a year-I am not speaking here to the real enthusiasts, they know better than I what they have to do.

For the last six or seven years the circus has no longer been in fashion. That is a pity.

You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.

And finally, in our time a beard is the one thing that a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.

Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt.

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.