Dear God, not a bucket list? Really, there is nothing that I want to do before I die, except perhaps just lie back and enjoy the morphine, daydreaming my way to oblivion.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).

I would have to take longer than a minute to give my whole synopsis of my life, but I want to let you know that all of us should be free and equal and have equal opportunity and that is what I’m trying to instill and encourage and inspire young people to reach their highest potential.

I would like to write a play which doesn’t disappoint me 20 years later.

What do I think it is? A fulfillment of a desire gives you happiness.

And yet I can’t tell you, for no one can prove what happens on the other side. It’s like anybody’s guess until it happens. You can say, I believe this would happen, but you can’t prove it.

The studios are superreluctant to give final cut. They have so much money riding on these things, so they want a committee to go and rule the roost.

It just, um, starts feeling correcter and correcter until it's done.

An idea comes. Scripts are organised ideas. When you read a script, it comes alive in your head. And that aliveness in the head is like seeing it and hearing it and knowing it. Or if an idea comes from outside, boom, you catch it in your brain and you see it and you hear it, and you know it. You sometimes fall in love with these things. All you do in cinema is translate those ideas. They talk to you, so you just stay true to the idea and translate it as good as you can.

On my film Dune, that experience could have finished me. It was so horrible. I identify so much with my films – and I knew I sold out – and meditation kept me from jumping off the cliff.