What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.

She was an absolute genius as a comedic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comedic dialogue. It was a God-given gift. Believe me, in the last fifteen years there were ten projects that came to me, and I'd start working on them and I'd think, 'It's not going to work, it needs Marilyn Monroe.' Nobody else is in that orbit; everyone else is earthbound by comparison.

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

I never overestimate the audience, nor do I underestimate them. I just have a very rational idea as to who we’re dealing with, and that we’re not making a picture for Harvard Law School, we’re making a picture for middle-class people, the people that you see on the subway, or the people that you see in a restaurant. Just normal people.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.