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

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

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.'

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

But at a certain point, and I don't really know... people have asked me this. I don't know exactly what it was that pushed me towards directing, but I think it was a naive notion that if I directed I would be able to play all the roles. A kind of greed.

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.

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