On a personal note, a legacy he left me, aside from being a friend who was important to me on many levels, was that the decades I knew Sam [Fuller] happened to be the decades that were his least happy professionally.

I was never a critic. I was a journalist and wrote about filmmakers, but I didn't review movies per se. I make that distinction only because I came to it strictly as someone who was just a lover of storytellers and cinematic storytellers. And I still am. I'm still a great movie fan, and I ,that love of movies is very much alive in me. I approach the movies I make as a movie-lover as much as a movie-maker.

What you care about [movie] is whether it's moving you, or whether you're caught up in it.

There are many people who want to make movies and very few opportunities for them to do it. I had a checkered early career with a lot of very unhappy experiences where pictures got taken away, re-cut, re-titled... all the nightmares one hears about. Consequently, it's so gratifying to then make a picture that's successful and gives you leverage to have better circumstances than you've ever had, before the next time out.

As ridiculous as it is for anybody who knows how movies are made, there were people who actually wrote in reviews that this picture [Bad Influence] had been put out to capitalize on the scandal. Which, of course, would have been impossible.

What I try to do is give each actor an environment in which they can do their best work.

My very first professional writing credit was on a movie called The Dunwich Horror, and Roger Corman was the executive producer.