If you need someone to come out of the sewer with a wire you don't hire someone who needs laborious collective instruction. You let someone do his job, whether he's a focus puller or a surgeon.

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 don't think you need $35 million bucks to make a movie. I think what people should do is make a lot more movies for a lot less money. You can really do it.

I'm a huge fan of director's cuts or reassemblies if they're good, but I remember being really excited about the restored version of Apocalypse Now, and then I preferred the original film. Kingdom of Heaven as a director's cut is the real picture, but in fact someone recently told me that there was another cut, the original first cut, which he said was just extraordinary. I've never seen it - and of course now I want to, if it exists, and so would everybody else.

Even though a screenplay is performed only once, unlike other forms of drama, it's still a performance in itself, and unless it's a great performance, odds are that actors will not come, and a movie will never be made.

You know a shooter when you see it. At least the creative people do. If a picture isn't obvious in the first draft you're kind of screwed.

Some reviewer might be out there saying, obviously Edge of Darkness didn't come off because of the script, blah blah blah, but everybody has read the script, except the journalist attacking it.