All films are political, whether they mean to be or not. Star Wars is political. As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics. It's just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others.

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

For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don't know that George Washington would be a president today, I don't know that Abe Lincoln would, I don't know that Roosevelt would.

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

I didn't grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.

Film is a collective experience, as you know.

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.