If you're an independent, you don't get on TV. And in the rare instances that you do get on, you get a fraction of what that very same movie would get if it came in through Fox or Viacom.

My favorite film is always the one that I most recently worked on.

If Shakespeare had lived in our age, he would have been sued for writing Romeo And Juliet, because as everybody knows, he plagiarized that from an Italian play.

The dean of the American Film Institute has written that I'm one of the very few auteurs in America. I've had freedom for 40 years to create art that is totally personal and is what I believe in.

I would only make a movie that I believe in. If I didn't believe in it, it would be unworthy.

Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain by now. What a better world it would be if other people were doing things with Mickey Mouse!

I didn't even know what a film director was. To me, Charlie Chaplin was a goofy clown, and John Ford - what? Never heard of him.