"I was born in Havana and my family left when I was five-and-a-half. I remember the transition and some memories of being in Havana. I tried to analyze this and I think all exiles who have to leave a country you love, develop a profound nostalgia for where you were born but can no longer be there – like an impossible love. You protect those memories and don’t take them for granted. It’s different for someone who grew up and still lives in the same city because they do take their memories for granted. For me, I’m very nostalgic – not only about my time in Havana, but my 30 years in Miami Beach. All those memories are pretty vivid and I guard and cherish them. I also use those recollections in my work."

“I ask myself those questions sometimes…But no, I think you're a slave to your own sensibility, and your own artistic desires and dreams, and I'm still motivated by them. I'm certainly not going to wait around for someone from Hollywood to call me. I can't control if anyone's thinking of me, or wants to put me in a movie, I can't control that. So I don't preoccupy myself with that world, because that world's an ever-changing animal, and there are new flavours of the month every month, and you might be one, one month, and then not the next. I'm blessed that I've been in that game in my life, but what I'm concerned with on a daily level is what I'm interested in.”

“I find solace in my country’s music, all my life. It’s been a great inspiration to me. In ‘The Lost City,’ the protagonist of the movie is the music. I tried to weave the elements of the Cuban culture, and historical elements that happened at that time. a very classical film in a way, the structure using a family as a microcosm of what is going on in the society, brothers against brothers politically, a father trying to keep his family together, impossible love: You can love her but you can’t be with her, which is the relationship of every exile in the world with his home country.”

“I'm American completely, and I think I appreciate America more than a lot of Americans do…In fact I know I do. Because America has offered me the freedoms that were taken away from me in Cuba, and so I have an enormous appreciation and respect and gratitude for that country, and I value what it stands for.”