If I worked in my apartment, I'd never leave my apartment.

This whole business of documentary being a second-class citizen is bullshit. A documentary can be as interesting, as dramatic, as sad, as funny, blah, blah, blah, as a fiction movie. Or it can be as awful as a fiction movie!

Even if I know I'm going to go to a church, I don't know what the minister's going to say.

Whether you're a newspaper journalist, a lawyer, a doctor. You have to organize your thoughts.

Paris is a beautiful city to walk around in. And, you know, all the obvious things: I like the museums, I like the theater, I like the dance. And it's manageable. The food's good. I know a lot of interesting people here. I lived in Boston for 50 years or more. Wherever I am, I'm usually holed up most of the time in the editing room, and so, when I leave the editing room, even if I just take a walk, it's gorgeous. And I walk everywhere. I'm a victim of the seduction of Paris.

You have to edit the material. That assumes that some kind of a mind is operating in relation to the material. Not all minds are the same. Every aspect of filmmaking requires choice. The selection of the subject, the shooting, editing and length are all aspects of choice.

It's rare in a documentary film that you have a repetitive act. So when you do, you can shoot it in different ways so that you have more choices when you're sitting down to edit that sequence six months later.