I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

I want to be interesting in an interview just as much as I want to do well in a part.

You don't get to know anybody in a movie until after it's over. You work less together in a film than you do onstage.

Did you know I started out as a stand-up comic? People don't believe me when I tell them. That's how I saw myself, in comedy.

I wouldn't be interested in [nowadays] television simply because I think it goes too fast. Except if something was maybe a play on television or some great television script.

Many years ago, in the late '70s, I toured colleges along the East Coast and I presented a kind of show where I got a lot of books and poetry and pieces of [William] Shakespeare and other writers that I admire, read it to the class and then afterward we would talk and I would answer questions. It was really a way of expressing and finding out about where I was at that particular time, so it was very therapeutic for me.

The play is the source, it is orchestrated with words. In a movie, you are not dealing with as much as that. There are machines and wires. When you're acting for a camera, it keeps taking and never giving back.