When I started I had no knowledge of films whatsoever. I was an engineering major at Stanford. And I found out as a senior that they had two film critics on the Stanford Daily, and they got free passes to all the theaters in Palo Alto. So I thought, I'll do that, and I became a film critic. And then I became interested in films. But I had no time to study anything in that area because I was a senior, just finishing up as engineering.

I love the process of making films and an incidental satisfaction is the fact that most of them made money.

Somebody who moved up very fast was Jim Cameron, who was a young guy out of - I think he came from Arizona, from some community college there, and he was building model spaceships, on a picture called Battle Beyond the Stars.

There were two practical reasons we moved to Venice. One was that there was an artists movement and a countercultural movement. Lots of people we might want to hire lived in the area. We also wanted to buy in a lower rent area that looked like it was going to be gentrified so that we could eventually sell the studio for more money.

Somebody said, 'Roger doesn't know how to spend money.' And I thought, 'I don't spend money because I don't have it!' If I had it, I could spend money! That's about the only time I was told that!

Maybe it's just a matter of getting older and being aware that the market for medium-budget and low-budget films, which is of course what I spent most of my life making, has diminished. And maybe the quantity of ideas has diminished a little bit.

When I started in the late 1950s, every film I made - no matter how low the budget - got a theatrical release. Today, less that 20-percent of our films get a theatrical release.