I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.

For some reason, I seem to work well with actors. I love working with them.

There's only one way to prep, so far as I know. You have your script, you hire the people you want, you find your locations and your setups, everybody shows up and you shoot the film.

They're done by guys who have talked a good game and then have scrambled together the simulacrum of a drama, so actors are habituated to sometimes having to save a picture on the floor because it's usually part of their job, but they'd rather have a writer doing his job, so that they can do theirs. But I like nothing better than working with actors.

I don't think Roger Ebert has ever mentioned a screenplay. He assigns every auctorial move to the director, which makes some sense since the director has run a one-off game, but if Hamlet were written last year and had been only performed once as a film, and it didn't come off well on screen for whatever reason, it would be gone forever as a literary work, and never would have been considered as one.

You're not turning the picture over to a system or a process, you are the process, and the most important thing is to have things exactly as you want them.

I cut London Boulevard pretty aggressively, but I liked the transitions and the elliptical feel that I got. It's not an exceptionally easy film to follow. You have to know that the paparazzo looks like Mark David Chapman. He hasn't got an expositional sign on him.