There's nothing revolutionary about Saturday Night Fever . You can see the same kind of movement at your local disco.

I wanted to do new things with dance, adapt it to the motion picture medium.

My mother had gotten a job as a receptionist at a dancing school and had the idea that we should open our own dancing school; we did, and it prospered.

I had been asked to open a nightclub in Atlantic City. They offered me a ridiculous amount of money. They literally overpaid me. So I did one show a night. Then they asked me back by popular demand. So I went back. Then I said, "To hell with this." I was only doing it for the money, and I was doing easy routines. It's just too much work to get up every day and practice.

At 14 I discovered girls. At that time dancing was the only way you could put your arm around the girl. Dancing was courtship. Only later did I discover that you dance joy. You dance love. You dance dreams.

Kids talk to me and say they want to do musicals again because they've studied the tapes of the old films. We didn't have that. We thought once we had made it, even on film, it was gone except for the archives.

I still find it almost impossible to relax for more than one day at a time.