One wants to be able to experience being other people, remaking a reality, remaking a life, remaking a certain world.

And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.

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.

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.

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.

It's always interesting to play people different from yourself, it would be boring for me to play myself.

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