If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.

If you're playing around with a film, you're just playing around with it. But if it has to go into theaters, you get yourself into gear and finish it.

I was particularly anxious that I shoot the tires out of the class system. All it is these days is a hobby of certain masochists, and certain sadists.

Redrafts can be very lucrative for me, but you must understand that if films go through many drafts or writers it's because someone doesn't want to do the picture and never will.

On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.

I don't move until an actor is happy, but it was very important to me as a so-called "first time director" to keep the machine moving. It was especially important to me to keep it moving and not be some kind of precious writer-director.

I can work in London. A British journalist asked me if I had any trouble working with an English crew, as an American, and I said I might have if I was from Scotland, but I'm from Massachusetts, which is sort of Oxfordshire, but more intellectual. That's kind of unforgivable but you've got to let them have it.