One of the problems of a director on the set is that we become overwhelmed by all the factors and threads of production, that sometimes we can't focus on our main job, which is steering the performances to create the whole film.

It becomes a lot better for the actors when we're 'shooting, shooting, shooting,' instead of waiting around in a trailer for something to happen.

I'm for people clinging. I'm pro-clinging.

Decline and Fall was a very depressing Evelyn Waugh novel, I think it was his first. I didn't get it at all, and then I got to love Waugh. And I think that maybe "Cosmopolitans" has a bit of an Evelyn Waugh vibe to it at some point.

There's a big difference between having relatives who have money and actually having it yourself. Just because you have a cousin who has a lot of money doesn't mean he shares it with you. Or that you'd ask him for a loan.

Find someone hypersocial and crazy and try not to follow them to their doom, but to make friends with their nicer friends.

[ Lady Susan novel by Jane Austen is] extremely difficult to adapt. I worked on it for years, for, like, ten years, before I started showing it to people. This was my back-burner project.