With 'New Rose Hotel,' I knew that I was getting paid a $100,000 fee to write, produce, and direct, and that's all I was going to get.

The more you get into any religion, it becomes the same. It really becomes how you treat other people and how you get outside yourself. How you look to help other people, and how you get out of this 'I, me, mine' type of thing.

My existence is about making movies, so I've just got to rock and roll with the punches. You want to make movies on telephones, I'm there.

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.

I don't care if I get $50 million to do a film.

I was born in the Bronx, and then my father moved us to the country at an early age.

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.