I come from a world where you get the film done, that's a success.

Mulberry Street was the beating heart of the Italian-American experience, but you don't find those gangsters now. I live with a bunch of yuppies and models.

A script is not a piece of literature, it's a process.

The actors that I love to work with, they're hard on me. They're pushing me.

It's always a problem when you're working with people you don't really know. Most filmmaking is about shaking hands and just starting. You know, these month - or two-month-long endeavors that millions of dollars are based on, and the people doing them don't even know each other, or know each other under pressure, or know each other when things are really... Which filmmaking is completely done under in many circumstances. You're under constant crisis, making a movie.

I grew up in the '60s, which was a creative time, so it wasn't that big of a stretch to go from a baseball bat to a guitar to a film camera.

It's funny, the hardest thing to do is to make something look like it's fast, loose and improvised, and get somebody to laugh.