A film director has to get a shot, no matter what he does. We're desperate people.

I was both very successful and very left; the living demonstration of how you could be on the left and still be in the gossip columns and be envied for the money you made.

If you're going to play a cowboy, show up with the horse at the audition

For years after I resigned, I was still faithful to their way of thinking. But not in the American Communists.

When you know what an actor has, you can reach in and arouse it. If you don't know what he has, you don't know what the hell is going on.

I owe Bankhead a gift; she made a director out of me.

I joined the Communist Party late in the summer of 1934. I got out a year and a half later.