I make films, and I hope that people come to see them. If they don't, I pay a big price. But I can't make decisions where I would change my own standards or my own taste in order to court the public in some way.

I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.

I love having made a film and watching it when it affects audiences in a positive way. It was always fun for me to hide in the back of a theater and watch Tootsie with an audience and hear them laugh. And it's gratifying 20 years later to imagine that they still can find it amusing.

I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.

When you work without a script, you are in a sense working in a much more improvisational way than when you are prepared totally.

You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.

I have to have a working knowledge of light, and optics, film emulsions and their properties, and lenses, otherwise I can't create the shoots that are the vocabulary of the films. But it is not necessary for me to be a cameraman, I can hire a cameraman.