The opera in Los Angeles is excellent.

The life of a film is very strange. Once the film is done, you wish you could forget about it and move on.

Life affirming doesn't mean good things happen.

The audience cares what the movie looks like, not about the sleepless night you had worrying about the thing getting developed.

You should just write the movie based on people you actually know and then just see who wants to play it. Cast the net.

Actors want to work with you but they want you to do their thing. Actors, whom I love with a blind partiality, sometimes they want to be soloists in the symphony, not a part of the orchestra.

Actors do want to work with me and I'm very grateful for that, but you never know. I could write parts for them that they don't want to play and then all of the sudden they don't want to work with you that much.

I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.

I continually marvel at people who can make films that reach five hundred million people. How do you do that? Everybody's different - I don't know how that works.

I don't think anybody realized until last Tuesday that this was a Klan-type outfit, a white supremacist-type outfit, ... Most people thought it was just a bunch of guys getting drunk on Saturday night or a drug deal that went bad.