Making a film is a way for me to understand what it's like to be a murderer, to confess, to be a beaten wife, to be a minority, to be a victor, to get the girl, to lose the girl. I can do all of that through the practice of an art form.

There's a religious basis to their [Bush and Chaney] kind of conservatism. It's rooted in a kind of fundamentalism. I'm afraid of that. I don't like that idea. I think all extremism is suspect.

With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.

I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.

Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.

If we were a primitive society, movie stars would be gods.

We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.