I didn't believe that I'd ever be lucky enough to be able to make a living as an actor.
And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.
If we were a primitive society, movie stars would be gods.
I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.
No, I never went to college. Always regretted it, always envied people who did.
I personally have never made a movie in Hollywood, because I don't want to get up in my own bed and then go to the movie set, and then come home at night to my real life.
Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.
Film is a collective experience, as you know.
What I really want to do is produce. There isn’t much patience with a slow developing story line anymore.
I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.
You are not an active creator of the film.
For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don't know that George Washington would be a president today, I don't know that Abe Lincoln would, I don't know that Roosevelt would.
By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that's led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do.
When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.
Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.
I don't know about liberal bias, but people of a liberal mentality are probably attracted in greater numbers to the arts than people of a conservative mentality.
You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.
Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies.
We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.
