Early in my career, people wanted to pigeonhole me as the bad guy because I'm of Italian-American descent, which they often were when I started out. You have to fight against it. One of the things that helps is the ability to do comedy.

I never go overbudget on my movies.

I'm a control freak. Totally.

The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses.

The thing is, I'm a very practical filmmaker.

Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote.

I mean, Scorsese's a genius, and that's one way of shooting.