“You know he comes out of stand-up. He comes – it’s all about capturing the moment – in the moment, you know.”

We’re still pushing it, you know. It is weird. Suddenly you wake up and it’s like, ‘God, five years have gone by.

Kinsey thought that Freud in his own way was as dangerous as the Catholic Church.

Our relationships, relationships between adults, how all those pieces fit together – that’s the most complicated thing we all face.

So I never thought of anything as making fun of it, but kind of reveling in the melodrama of it. It’s a melodrama.

It’s in the nature of television to restrain the spontaneity of a live event. Things become more and more prepackaged.

Kinsey would identify himself with Galileo in moments of feelings of persecution.

But the imposition of morality onto science, – where it does not belong – has become rampant in recent years.

But you really – I always think that a director has got to adapt to whatever the needs of the actor are. You know, so if you take someone like Eddie Murphy, who is not a big fan of rehearsal.

There’s no question that Whale’s movies are classics. They were wonderful, and successful.

That day I think we really saw each other for the first time. I mean, saw beyond the bag of bones on the outside. You take away her pretty and my plain and what you get underneath is about the same: a couple of lost girls looking to be found.

I do think that’s so much a part of what being a director is – in working with actors – to really try and be sensitive to what each actor needs to get to where he wants to be.

I had a couple of movies that I was passionately involved with that I could never get made. ‘Richard Pryor,’ I wrote for – gosh – over a year. That was close to getting made for two-and-a-half years after that.

My idea of a beach holiday is going to New York for two weeks, just going and hanging out.

For me, someone like the Eddie Murphy character doesn’t live anywhere; he lives on a stage and when he’s not on the stage he’s on a bus getting to the next stage.

There were moments on the set when the depth of the cast of ‘Dreamgirls’ was almost overwhelming to me.

I wanted to make connections between Whale’s past and present.

There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor.