That was the case for me when I made Angel, which was in English and was a big flop.

I was prepared to fail. I was prepared to not be able to get things accepted, because I saw that happen to my mother.

So Cambridge rejected me. Quite rightly, although at the time I thought it was a little churlish. So, I had to do it without any university training. ... and I began to realize that there were probably a lot more of these things, and that if you find these things, you get a position in the ladder which you can’t get to unless you have either got an education or something else. So by finding important things, you immediately get into the game, which you’d been excluded from otherwise.

To launch Canva, we needed investment and a tech team. Finding the right people for both took two years but there is always a lot of rejection for entrepreneurs in their early days. But every time we got a hard question or a reason why people wouldn't invest, we stayed focused on what we could change. I revised our pitch deck after every meeting, more than 100 times in one year, to answer the questions or fix the reason for rejection from the last time. You just have to keep going. The normal thing to do after your 100th, 80th or even 20th ‘no’ would be to stop, but you just have to persevere.

Always have final cut

Well, my family moved to Alexandria, Virginia from Boise, Idaho when I was in the eighth grade. Pretty soon after that, one night, on the front lawn of my girlfriend’s house, I met a boy named Toby Keeler, who went to a private school. He told me his father was a painter. At first I thought he meant a house painter, but then he said, “No, fine art painter” and a bomb went off in my head. In that millisecond, I only wanted to be a painter.

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.

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.

I don’t know if that is true. There have been 110 or more years of cinema, and it’s impossible for any one of us to make a film that can’t be compared to something that has come before. To me Blue Velvet is Blue Velvet and Rear Window is Rear Window. You could say that Sunset Boulevard or Rear Window has conjured an idea for me, but even though I love them or am inspired by them, life is a 24/7 movie. Ideas come out of that all the time. It’s hard to say it’s cinema that conjures ideas. It’s altogether.

consciousness is the “I am-ness” of life. We can only say, “I am,” because of consciousness. And without consciousness, we wouldn’t exist.