It was not possible to film in California, because all the areas are heavily built up now. Coming to Cape Town is an invitation to step into the past and recreate Los Angeles of the 1930s.

People who can't think of anything else but whether the person you love is indented or convex should be doomed not to think of anything else but that, and so miss the other ninety-five percent of life.

Relative to the power that movie stars have, and producers and directors, I would say that even the most respected screenwriters have very little power in Hollywood. I don't think it's in the nature of the writer's profession to go after that power. Writers spend their time alone, hallucinating, writing, making these things up, while these other people are out schmoozing, making connections, meeting each other. They are trotting the corridors of power and making sure they've put their own imprints in it. And they're promoting themselves and their images, as they should.

The one thing you know when you're shooting a script - and I've been on a lot of sets - is space is in a script, and the distance between the page and the stage is so enormous that it is unbelievable how even the brightest people can misread your intent or not see it altogether. Scripts have air in them. Scripts are supposed to leave things up to interpretation, but people can misread things enormously, so sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to put on the screen what you had in mind.

I'm not in business to be loved, but I am in business.

But time has caught up with it and I think vindicated it. Shampoo, too: very dark, very ambitious movie.

If you can find meaning in the type of running you need todo to stay on this team, chances are you can find meaning in another absurd pastime: Life.