One of the worst things you can do is have a limited budget and try to do some big looking film. That's when you end up with very bad work.

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 think one of the reasons movies are the quintessential modern art form is that it is partially a business. The director needs a crew - the writer, the producer, etcetera - and to have that, he needs money.

Jim Cameron is proof that if you are good, you'll get promoted.

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

I've never made the film I wanted to make. No matter what happens, it never turns out exactly as I hoped.

The safest genre is the horror film. But the most unsafe - the most dangerous - is comedy. Because even if your horror film isn't very good, you'll get a few screams and you're okay. With a comedy, if they don't laugh, you're dead.