At the moment, my mother is the only one left in Glasgow, although it's certainly my home.
I didn't think Comfort and Joy was going to be a box-office smash.
I don't really enjoy filming.
I made That Sinking Feeling more for them than for anyone else, so I knew there was no need to put a message into it.
I think, unconsciously, I was addressing myself more with Comfort and Joy than with my other films to Scottish people.
I was quite surprised how easily people wanted to pigeonhole things I've done.
I went to the Glasgow Youth Theatre and they just let me in. But I was so shy that I was there for about six weeks without actually introducing myself.
I'd made these experimental films but I thought the major chore of a filmmaker was to relate to actors.
I'm not fond of any of my films in an intimate way, but Gregory's Girl would be number 4 on my list.
I've spent most of my life in Scotland, and I haven't moved around a great deal.
If you ask for relatively little money, they worry that you are going to get involved in something that is unwatchable or, worse, unmarketable.
It means that if they misunderstood Comfort and Joy, they misunderstood my other films.
It was only about ten years ago that we had the first local radio show in Galsgow, and that was so unusual it took my fancy.
It was three years after I'd finished the script for Gregory's Girl that I got to make it, but I prefer That Sinking Feeling as a film.
It's easier for me to get three times the amount of money I really want.
It's easy for me to be a Scotsman because of the overwhelming feeling of most people in Scotland of being subservient to England and therefore having a chip on our shoulder.
My two elder sisters married Englishmen and went abroad.
People think the stock market is a place of levelheadedness but it actually works in a totally emotional way: the President gets a pimple on his nose, and the thing plummets.
Perhaps naively I thought people understand what humor was, that it was invented by the human race to cope with the dark areas of life, problems and terrors.
So those who misunderstood Comfort and Joy the most were those who thought I was just trying to make a jolly farce.
That period of my life I was fairly reserved and I tried to make a collection of images that didn't really involve people.
The movie business is very much like that: people in authority making purely emotional decisions instead of interesting rational ones.
The studio system reminds me of the stock market.
There are things that Scotsmen get and other people don't get in the dialogue. Scottish characters can be pinpointed by a phrase, targeted very quickly.
Universal wasn't out a lot of money, a million dollars or so, so it was easy not to put a lot of effort into the movie.
Unmarketable is a much more worrying term for them because if they can find an angle to make something unwatchable marketable, they'll do it every week.
When I read Housekeeping, it wasn't from the point of filming. It was months and months later that the idea of making it into a movie caught.
When I was a very small boy, my father was a plumber in a shipping yard, but then it transpired that he became a grocer.
God will not damn a lunatic's soul. He knows that the powers of evil are too great for those of us with weak minds.
Superstition? Who can define the boundary line between the superstition of yesterday and the scientific fact of tomorrow?
The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him.
To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious. There are far worse things awaiting man than death.
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