I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini.

Cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby.

There can't be art without risk. It's like saying No Sex, and then expecting there to be children.

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.

You ought to love what you're doing because, especially in a movie, over time you really will start to hate it.

One thing that I'm sure of is the real pleasure of life - it's not being known, it's not having your own jet plane, it's not having a mansion the pleasure is to learn something

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.