As a filmmaker, "no" is not in my vocabulary. I've got to figure out a way.

The score is always the wonderful icing. The score tells you the emotional content of the film. What the characters don't say, the music can say.

You'd be surprised how many movie stars still care about the work.

An actor has to embody a role.

I make films about working class people. All my films have always been about that. For example, the brothel is a workplace. It's aberrant, but a workplace nonetheless. I was more interested as opposed to glamorizing and saying, oh, this is a great erotic place, it's a place of business. The commodity is sex.

I also know what looks good before the camera, how to move the camera, and how to get a story on the screen.

But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.