Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so.

Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.

I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy.

I've done it with Broadcast News-where there was no finish line, there was no agenda that I had to move all the characters to this point, that I was sort of open to what happens.

Media reporting denied privacy to anybody doing what I do for a living. It was no longer possible to work on your picture in privacy.

You become so obsessed, and that's not a bad thing for a movie. Serve it with that sense that it's the whole world.

I spent two years telling studio heads that it wasn't a cancer picture. I hate cancer pictures. I don't want to see a cancer picture. There is only one thing worth saying about cancer, and that is that there are human beings in cancer wards.