People are always asking me to do Shakespeare - at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It's like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It's great therapy.

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.

Forget the career, do the work. If you feel what you are doing is on line and you're going someplace and you have a vision and you stay with it, eventually things will happen.

I come from the South Bronx - a true descendant of the melting pot. I grew up in a really mixed neighborhood; it was a very integrated life.

Everything changes with age. The parts change with age, your feelings about them change, roles that I would've wanted to play 10 years ago, I don't want to play now.

Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.

[Oscar Wilde's Salome screenplay] is not autobiographical in a sense where you go to my house and see my kids and stuff like that, but that's why I guess it's semi-autobiographical.