She [Susan Lucci] was extraordinary. She wouldn't look at the scene until you walked in to rehearse it. It was amazing to me. That's the impression I got anyway.

Being an actor myself I realize that all actors believe they are qualified to play any role. If you showed me a script with a black woman character I would tell you that I could do it. That is what we do. We act as if we are someone else.

I did a film many years ago called The Man Without A Face.Gaby [Hoffmann] was in with Mel Gibson. That was his directing debut. He did a great job.

I still to this day maintain that in that million-and-a-half feet of film [Heaven's Gate] that we shot, we thought we were making a great American film. I honestly believe that Michael [Cimino] was under a tremendous amount of pressure, and Michael's response to pressure from what I saw was to double down and to get more aggressive and to get more kind of arrogant, but I don't think it was real. I think it was the response to pressure.

But people who think they can project themselves into deafness are mistaken because you can't. And I'm not talking about imagining what a deaf person's whole life is like I even mean just realizing what it is like for an instant.

Most profoundly deaf people have speech that is very difficult to understand.

For example, the first time McDonald's put a deaf person in a commercial they saw a jump in sales. I think that happens with other kinds of disabilities and products and that is something that is being realized more and more.