It's not enough to hit the notes. There is no point in the singers just standing there and sounding wonderful if they're not connecting with the characters they are portraying.

Perhaps the most difficult thing is shooting scenes set 6,000 feet up in the mountains of Mexico.

With Cold Sassy Tree having its first production, I saw no necessity to do anything other than produce it with the correct setting.

At HBO, they seem to be well-informed. They make what I think are really quite mature films.

In Australia, they set up a special fund to kick films off. It was quite an enlightened sort of move. You could go to this government bureau with scripts and and get finance for films.

For a director, the most challenging scenes are the dialogue scenes.

In silent movies, they tended to put the camera down, and everybody walked in front of it and acted, and then they all walked off. Cutting was quite infrequent.