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

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.

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.

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 remember the first film I reviewed for the Daily was a John Ford Western. I think it was My Darling Clementine, but I am not certain. And I was just impressed by, first, the story itself. I didn't know that much about films. But the acting, the director. And particularly, the cinematography, the black-and-white use of exteriors, I noted particularly.

I do believe motion pictures are the significant art form of our time. And I think the main reason is, they're an art form of movement, as opposed to static art forms of previous times.

Martin Scorsese was one of the few who had not been an assistant. Most of the guys had been an assistant and worked their way up. But I had seen an underground picture he had made in New York, a black-and-white film. I had done a picture for American International, about a Southern woman bandit, the Ma Barker story, and it was very successful, and I had left to start my own company, and they wanted me to make another one.