Sitting down to a meal with an Indian family is different from sitting down to a meal with a British family.

If you spend a whole afternoon just eating popcorn and watching football, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if that’s all you do, you get swept along with the tide, without any idea of where you’re going.

Conventionally, one looks at history as something of the past. But after Einstein, who knows what is in the past and what is in the present?

I try to address my audiences intelligently. The man in the street counts, but sometimes he forgets that he counts.

I like cinema audiences. I respect them, and I talk to them just like I would anybody I know.

If the movie’s well made and it’s about things that count, people will ultimately see the depth in it.

The history of the white man in India really jumped up and bit me in the neck.

I think a film should have a gestation period of at least two or three years.

The actor is concerned with his own bit of it, but the director’s somehow trying to work the whole thing into a much bigger picture. It’s like conducting an orchestra.

Good directing is about getting the performance to be just what’s right for the movie.

In India, one has to plan according to the monsoons.

I cannot forget a conversation that I had with an elderly couple from the tribe. They asked me whether I would kill them after I had finished. When I asked them why they asked that, they replied, Because you white men always do!

I think the job of movie reviewing can be really tough. If a film has layers that need to be thought about, it’s easy to get missed the first time around.

When you look at our world, the truth is that we’re all under the influence of politics.

Making the City Of Joy gave me the best political education of my life. It became a wrestling match between an Englishman who had gradually ceased to be a Marxist, and a culture that was becoming more Marxist by the day.

Music is a very integral part of the film, but it will not be as full of music as a Bollywood film.

Very good coaches for ski jumpers stand at the top of the slope and watch the jumpers prepare, rather than standing at the bottom and watching them land.

I think that will be a lot of fun for audiences to get the same stream of consciousness that was going through my head at the time. It was very exciting to suddenly recall what I was feeling at the time.

Sitting down to a meal with an Indian family is different from sitting down to a meal with a British family.

It’s hard to blame someone because they simply don’t have time.

I simply wanted to state that during this little slice of history, this is what happened and these were the good sides of it, these were the more dangerous sides of it, and this was the result.

I’m not a very serious person. You know how they say that clowns are very funny in public and are really sad at home? I’m really kind of stupid at home and more serious in public.

I don’t really say much about reviewers. It’s a very tough job to get all of the depth of a movie all at once.

Even if we don’t know it or aren’t aware of it, politics and philosophy are really what make our up lives.

I began to feel that, in a sense, we were all prisoners of our own history.

I’ve never wanted to do something where I’d berate the audience.

Much of Indian science seems intuitive and not bound by the rigid thinking of classical scientists.

Indian culture certainly gives the Indian mind, including the mind of the Indian scientist, the ability to think out of the box.

Eventually, the tribe developed so much confidence in me that they invited me to be their chieftain.

I like DVDs so much – it’s such a better format than VHS.

They suggested I should introduce an element of reincarnation in the story. At first, I thought that was silly. But then, this whole time dimension began to fascinate me.