I still come from a very working-class family. My mother's still a cleaner. And my brother is the gas man. And my other brother runs a cab. I have become a stratified, different, exotic beast, even more so than I was when I was a young gay man. I just sort of built on that. Now that I've made several films, I don't even know how to placate them with money like so many people do with their families.

As I found out making this last movie ["Method"], if you ever do things in an unusual, different way, you got to fight because there's no way people will let you.

Writers and filmmakers have this age-old relationship to the material.

As you get older and more successful, you don't get magnetically drawn to aristocracy, you get magnetically drawn to power, and it gets magnetically drawn to you. It's a symbiosis whether you like it or not.

I know I'm part of the changing process of the way we look at things.

Whether it's Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde, they're brilliant with genius bon mots. Of course, I find them extraordinary.

I found my friends very amusing the first time because they are funny and amusing. They really are because they're people who've got everything. They're sort of like camp caricatures of what you expect an aristocrat should be: vicious, rude, caustic unpleasantries.