“Michael Jackson wanted to be in Men in Black II. He told me he had seen the first Men in Black in Paris and had stayed behind and sat there and wept.”

We should all relax about life because you don’t have a clue as to what’s really going on.

There is something about being a director where, for me personally, I get to . . . it’s the closest I’ll ever come to being able to be a stand up.

By definition a sequel can’t be original. So you’ve got to figure out what worked the first time around.

I haven’t read a review of one of my films for the best part of 10 years.

And then through editing, and finishing the effects and adding music, you get to make the movie better again. So I’m really hard on myself and on the movie.

And my feeling was if I was going to succeed as a director, I had to just be a director and give up the safety net of being a cameraman.

I’m not the one or two take guy, but I’m not the 20, 30, 50, 70 take guy either. If I do a bunch of takes, like more than five or six, it’s usually for some technical reasons.

These movies are like my kids. I just love them to death. Some of them go to Harvard and some of them can barely graduate high school.

I was seeing a lot of really good things about Get Shorty when it came out, and my wife pointed out that if you validate the good reviews, you also have to validate the bad reviews.

Michael worked one day. Everybody was a little freaked out and nervous because he’s a really big star. We were already working with really big stars, but Michael is Michael.

When I move from being a cameraman to being a director I looked at a lot of other cameramen who tried to make the move. And in each case they moved up their camera operator to be the DP, which really meant they didn’t want to give up being the DP, and really wanted to do both.

It felt scary because there was no auditioning, no rehearsing.

And to use my particular sense of humor, and hear people laughing, without me having to stand up in front of an audience and tell jokes.

I had to explain to him that it was a comedy.

The first cut I do is usually between five and 10 minutes shorter then the cut that we release.

The weird thing is that I hate to fly, and the quote that I give people is that every time I get off a plane, I view it as a failed suicide attempt.

Bob Dylan is quite a songwriter, and a great singer and musician. I won’t bother with comparing myself to him, but I will say that I heard his records at a very young age and I still listen to all his records.

I didn’t write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn’t.

I’m 90% performer, 10% musician. I’ve always said that Gossip are a band I would go see, not a band I would listen to.

Like family, we are tied to each other. This is what all good musicians understand.

Musicians now find themselves in the unlikely position of being legitimate. At least the IRS thinks so.

I have seen so many bands and musicians fade away, especially the ones in my early days that treated me and my bands with contempt for no other reason than that they were headlining the show, not all though, with great exceptions such as Slade and Vinegar Joe.

The magic of playing has to do with how much everyone wants it to succeed.

If you have five players in a situation where the music is being improvised and one is determined it is not going to succeed, it won’t succeed even if one of the musicians takes control.