Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process.
I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.
Every single art form is involved in film, in a way.
I have one life. I am a certain age. I'm married to one person. I have a certain number of children. I won't have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films.
I didn't grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.
I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.
Making a film is a way for me to understand what it's like to be a murderer, to confess, to be a beaten wife, to be a minority, to be a victor, to get the girl, to lose the girl. I can do all of that through the practice of an art form.
I mean, the truth of the matter is, I like the failures as much as I like the successes, it's only the world that doesn't like the failures.
Every film I've made has a kind of frustrated love story in the center of it. They were people who saw life from opposing points of view, which has been in every film I've ever done. It had all the ingredients of the kinds of films I like to do.
When you spend your life acting and being other people, as opposed to being the one person that you are, you learn that life is gray sometimes, not black and white. That what you thought was true isn't necessarily true if you switch sides.
Most human beings who are accustomed to attempting to see the world from various points of view tend to be more liberal than conservative.
All films are political, whether they mean to be or not. Star Wars is political. As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics. It's just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others.
Making films is much more difficult than people imagine, and so the experience of actually directing them is not one I've ever relished.
One wants to be able to experience being other people, remaking a reality, remaking a life, remaking a certain world.
I'm trying to be morally responsible and no more. I don't have an agenda I'm trying to push. People talk about Three Days of the Condor as being anti-government but the last statement in that movie is the CIA guy saying to Robert Redford, "Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You want to know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!"
It's always interesting to play people different from yourself, it would be boring for me to play myself.
The dance that happens, between actor and director, is a very delicate thing...it's why people tend to work together on many films over and over.
You can be moderate in a way and still intense in your views. It's the extremism that gets frightening; religious fundamentalism and wacko-left liberalism is crazy.
With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.
Most human beings who are accustomed to attempting to see the world from various points of view tend to be more liberal than conservative. I have one life. I am a certain age. I'm married to one person. I have a certain number of children. I won't have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films. It's a way for me to understand what it's like to be a murderer, to confess, to be a beaten wife, to be a minority, to be a victor, to get the girl, to lose the girl. I can do all of that through the practice of an art form.
The essence of acting is seeing the world from another point of view. That's what acting is.
I love having made a film and watching it when it affects audiences in a positive way. It was always fun for me to hide in the back of a theater and watch Tootsie with an audience and hear them laugh. And it's gratifying 20 years later to imagine that they still can find it amusing.
Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.
But, I've made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.
Obviously its a good feeling to know that something you've done has lasted.
