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.

Without English art, I never would have understood myself, my own family, or the New England world I lived in.

It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.

I never work until I have a deadline. You have to fit so much in a given day that you just don't get serious until you know when the deadline is.

Because you're running an enterprise with two hundred-odd people, and it's really your responsibility to keep it moving quickly. So you have to know what you're doing, do it, and move on.

In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.

If TV seems improved, I think it's been enhanced by violence and sex permissible on cable, as well as better cinematography, but in the end it's really only soap operas like your grandmother's afternoon "stories" and that's all it wants to be or has to be.