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.

I love actors and I understand what has to happen within a scene. Any scene is an acting scene and actors never act alone, so there has to be an interchange. If it's a dialog scene, if it's a love scene, it doesn't matter because you need to establish a situation.

When Ray Charles is concentrating he's like a piece of granite, nothing twitches, nothing, ... He sat for 25 minutes solid like that, like a stone, and I thought, 'Oh my God, if he doesn't like it I'm dead.' ... And then finally, after 25 minutes he started to talk back to the screen. I heard him say 'That's right. That's the truth.' .

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

The most disgusting, appalling horror of our world that we live in, to me, is sex trafficking and the enslavement of men and women, boys and girls, in the sex industry. That is the most horrific, horrific thing that's happening and it's happening in all of our towns here in Los Angeles, in New York, in London, in Paris, all over the world, and I think that's really what has to be addressed.

Music has always been an important thing to me in my life and understand I've worked in the music business.

It's very clearly stated in the film: You make your own choices, and what you're always fighting is ego.