You know, essentially when you do a play you're reinterpreting a work of art that already exists. That's not what happens with a movie.

When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.

Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.

You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.

You are not an active creator of the film.

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.

Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.

Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.

And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.