Steven Soderbergh

After making a lot more films, I realized that the movie and TV business is, for all its inefficiencies, one of the best-run big businesses we have.

I'm sure some people will say, 'Why do this?' And my response is, 'Why wouldn't you?' The film business in general is using a model that is outdated and, worse than that, inefficient.

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.

Well, it's 15 years since Sex, Lies And Videotape, and if you hang around long enough you're having the same arguments with just a new set of people every few years and it gets boring.

The key is, if you're not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.

If you talk to any filmmaker, and if you said to them, 'I guarantee you x amount of money per month for the rest of your life, and it's not a big amount of money, but I can also guarantee that you will work continually, you will get to make what you want to make,' any filmmaker on the planet will make that kind of deal. I would have made it.

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

I watch a lot of true crime on TV.

As vocal as some people have been about how emotionally attached they've been to celluloid, I've been equally emotional in my stance that nothing is more valuable than this. Than being able to see the result of your work quickly.

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit.