Mehmet was the first sultan, and one of the first Muslims anywhere, to defy religious tradition by allowing his portrait to be made.

I'm related to the portrait painter George Romney.

My films are never about what Hong Kong is like, or anything approaching a realistic portrait, but what I think about Hong Kong and what I want it to be.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There's not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that's shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.

With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing's identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design.

My responsibility isn't to paint a flattering portrait; my responsibility is to paint a real portrait, a true portrait.

There are a lot of recurring themes that I resonated with when I read 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.'

I'm a big historian. Big JFK fan. I got to take a picture under the official JFK White House portrait.

'The Red' delivers intense action, leavened by a genuinely sympathetic portrait of soldiers caught up in battles they never chose.

Kids would come up to me after concerts and give me drawings they've made of violins or, you know, landscapes with a violin floating in it or some sketch of a concert or a portrait of me.

For years, I've had a hankering for the portrait of Benjamin Franklin by Joseph Duplessis. Franklin is credited with so many inventions: the postal system, lightning rods, the constitution. He was a rock star before there was such a thing.

You know, if one paints someone's portrait, one should not know him if possible.

So, did I work with Warhol? I worked with him less on that play then I did on other things. He actually did a portrait of my rabbit and some other stuff. Warhol was definitely... Warhol.

There's a discipline. When you take someone's portrait, you don't have to take 50 photographs, just find that one so that when you release the shutter, that's the image that you took.