People gravitate occasionally to the brilliantly made art low budget films, which is maybe one out of every five hundred low budget films made.

You learn, of course, when you're working with something good, but you also can learn when you're working with things that are not good. You can see the reasons they're not good. I would sometimes suggest what could be done, but essentially say "It isn't worth the bother." So I learned from that process.

I was young, so I was part of youth culture. The years went by, I became older and no longer part of youth culture, and I became more dependent upon the young people in the office and my own children.

In order to create art today, you have to compromise your art somewhat and be a businessman.

There was a fairly big difference between Detroit and Beverly Hills. I remember this. Detroit actually was a prosperous bustling city when we moved here in 1941. But the first day in Detroit, you always wore a shirt and a tie to school. And I wore a shirt and a tie to Beverly Hills High School, and a girl came up to me and said, "Where are you from?" And I said, "Detroit." And she said, "And you won't be wearing a tie tomorrow, will you?" And I said, "You're absolutely correct." So that was my first adjustment to a slightly more casual environment.

A great director, first, is highly intelligent. And he is also a dedicated and willing to work hard. Now those are easy things to identify. The third is the creativity, and that is very difficult to identify in advance. This is why so many of the directors who have started with me were my assistant - the first one was Francis Ford Coppola.

I was called recently in some article "Hollywood's Oldest Established Rebel." So I'm sort of working from the inside now, with still a little bit of a rebellious spirit.