The best way to make friends with an audience is to make them laugh. You don't get people to laugh unless they surrender - surrender their defenses, their hostilities. And once you make an audience laugh, they're with you. And they listen to you if you've got something to say. I have a theory that if you can make them laugh, they're your friends.

Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.

No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark.

If the audience gets everything, if they see the photography and notice that it is good, then the story goes out the window, but if you become involved with the lives of the actors and forget that you are seeing mechanical devices on a huge screen - forget the make-believe - this is the job of the director to involve the audience with the actors.

Making money, getting yourself status in this world is not everything at all. But it has become everything in America. That you really have to get going and keep up with the Jones'. Get a house and a car and other things. And pretty soon you're stymied. Things own you.

There's music in my films but you seldom hear it. Very early I got the idea that the important things in films were people - the actors. They are the intermediary between the director and the audience. They make direct contact. People to people communication.

The best way to make friends with an audience is to make them laugh. You don't get people to laugh unless they surrender - surrender their defenses, their hostilities. And once you make an audience laugh, they're with you. And they listen to you if you've got something to say. I have a theory that if you can make them laugh, they're your friends.