I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.'

Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren’t in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.

For me the writing, when I’m going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don’t change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn’t going to give you any more money.

I’m never at a loss for new projects.

The hardest thing about movie acting is that if you’re playing a character who changes within the movie, you’ve got to do that, but you’ve got to do it out of sequence, because we never have gotten to shoot in sequence, and that’s really, really tough.

When I was really young I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.

When I read a story or see something play out in front of me I say, how come nobody’s made a movie or a television show out of this? This is something that belongs in the conversation. Certainly that’s what interests me about a project.

He likes to know things. He checks out book and record collections when he visits people, looks in medicine cabinets, takes inventory in refrigerators. He eaves drops on conversations at public phone booths. He reads murder victims’ mail.

But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn’t have to pay, and all those extras; we didn’t have to pay them.