You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.

One of the things that wrong with pictures today, I think, is that so many of the people making them started out wanting to.

If filmmakers are ignorant of the past, they laborto re-invent the wheel in every picture. You sit and think, 'Well,we're back to 1903 here.'

Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things.

Cher is one of the most talented women I've ever met. She's got depth and emotion that haven't even been touched.

The criterion for judging whether a movie is successful or not is time.

The actors are in control, getting outrageous amounts of money. The reason they're getting this kind of money is because the studios don't know what else to do. They don't have a clue about what to do except to pay an actor a lot of money.