It's a really unfair world because life is where I am all day long we listen to American music. So I don't see why the radios in the U.S. cannot even put aside one hour a day just to play music that is not American.

We are living in a time when American popular music is finally being recognized as one of our most successful exports. The demand is huge.

First of all the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.

Since I was a kid I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties Chicago blues of the Fifties West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

I'd love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.

Have you listened to the radio lately? Have you heard the canned frozen and processed product being dished up to the world as American popular music today?

The thing is there have been American movies that are similar to Solaris like Alien had a lot of things that are similar although it's also got the horror element.

In movies there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It's a quiet difficult undertaking requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.

American movies are often very good at mining those great underlying myths that make films robustly travel across class age gender culture.

What I liked about American movies when I was a kid was that they're sort of larger than life and I think I'm still suffering from that reaction.