My strength is with actors. I think I'm good at working with them to get the best performances, at seeing what it is that they have and that the story needs.

And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.

If you have a career like mine, which is so identified with Hollywood, with big studios and stars, you wonder if maybe you shouldn't go off and do what the world thinks of as more personal films with lesser-known people. But I think I've fooled everybody. I've made personal films all along. I just made them in another form.

It's my job to motivate the audience to believe. I have to get them to suspend their judgment in favor of involvement.

You hope that the responsibility of making movies will fall into the hands of essentially moral people.

Making a movie is a network of decisions that keep multiplying as you go. You leave a trail of decisions behind you, and that's how you start to see the shape of what you've done. When you get far enough, you turn around and say, 'Ha, that's the movie.' It's only then that you find out if it's going to work or not.