My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life.

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.

Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye.