If I'm intimidated, I shouldn't be directing a movie. I gotta treat 'em as characters, not as stars. It's hard to not treat Marlon Brando as a legend, a star, it's difficult not to treat Robert De Niro as a star, but that had to go away very fast after I knew them, because I had to work with them. I'm the director, I'm the boss. They're looking to me for guidance.

I don't like to have these words banded about, like "British sense of humor," "American sense of humor," though I'll be damned if I know what they are.

I just want to do good work. That's all I want to do. I don't have big aspirations like being the President of the United States, I just want to do good work. That's all.

I want to get into the theater. I really wanted to be a theater director, but I turned out to be a movie director.

I was a weird kid. I shouldve been gay because I listened to a lot of Broadway musicals. I dont know why Im not gay. I listen to a lot of jazz and world music, like African or Cuban music. Something that has vitality to it. A lot of the American stuff just feeds on itself.

I'm always amused that people zero in on one thing, and it's the wrong thing to zero in on, but nevertheless, the reason they do that is because the voice is what they know - the voice represents everything about the character, that's why.

Our job as directors is to entertain an audience, it's not just to do it for the director. You might as well sit in a white room and look at the movie for the rest of your life - it's ridiculous.