If we just sit and exist, and understand that, I think it will be helpful in a world that seems like a record that's going faster and faster, we're spinning off the edge of the universe.

I grew up in the Lower East Side, an Italian American - more Sicilian, actually.

The only way I was able to defend myself was to be able to take punishment. Then I got a lot of respect. They said, "Oh, he's okay, he can take it. Don't hit him." The guys were pretty big, and I had asthma.

I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.

I don't know how else to tell the story except to utilise that vocabulary: the rain, the darkness, the mansions, the framing, etc, the lighting and that sort of thing.

Food tells you everything about the way people live and who they are.

The storyboard for me is the way to visualise the entire movie in advance.