Every story needs an element of suspense - or it's lousy.
I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.
South Bend is a nice town, but you know that phrase - 'I was homesick even when I was home.'
I don't know about liberal bias, but people of a liberal mentality are probably attracted in greater numbers to the arts than people of a conservative mentality.
I'd get bored if I... if I had to do a movie, and there was no love story in it, I would just be bored. I mean, I would do it, but it would be kind of boring.
There will be people who are sensitive about seeing the American point of view presented as less than sympathetic.
The marketing of anything is full of exploitation and lies and hype.
You can't stop traffic on Times Square.
Before I saw 'Tootsie' with an audience, I thought, 'No one is going to believe this could convince anyone he's a woman.'
American movies are the most popular movies everywhere, and it is true that the quality is far from uniformly terrific.
When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.
When you're shooting a feature that costs $200,000 a day with a crew of 250, you don't want accidents; you want to know exactly what's going to happen. But with a documentary, you don't, so you have to be sensitive to accidents because that is where the gold is.
I don't care much about acting.
Even in 'Victor/Victoria,' there was talk about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man. You didn't get that in the old days, in 'Charley's Aunt' or 'Some Like It Hot.'
It's hard for me to fall in love with a piece of material enough to want to direct it.
Audiences want to feel something intense, quickly, without wasting a lot of time.
People sense when you're pretending, when you're worried about your own ego.
I fly an aeroplane, and I think a lot about how much I do not want ever to run into an optimistic air traffic controller. I just don't. I want a guy down there who's just waiting for the worst crash possible and petrified that it's going to happen on his watch. And then I feel safe flying into his territory.
When you first start out, you want to be Fellini, or you want to be Bergman.
If I'm lucky, in my wildest dreams I can make a picture every three years.
