I've been blessed with enough wealth that I can make a film myself up to a certain budget. So one way I thought I would reinvent myself was just to make these very small, personal films that I've financed myself.

My film isn't about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little we went insane.

I associate my motion picture career more with being unhappy and scared, or being under the gun, than with anything pleasant.

I've been failing for, like, ten or eleven years. When it turns, it'll turn. Right now I'm just trying to squeeze through a very tight financial period, get the movie out, and put my things in order.

In a sense, I think a movie is really a little like a question and when you make it, that's when you get the answer.

It's ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn't even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again.

I bring to my life a certain amount of mess.