“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.”

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

In Hollywood through the 50s, there were black, English, and Middle European housekeepers and maids.

Kinsey was six foot five, and he had this leader of men quality.

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 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.

I never saw myself as a director. It’s certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

Great directors can understand the staging in such a way that can make a scene come alive. Others have a certain way of pacing the scene.

I thought, what’s going on? Did some whale get washed up to shore? So I stood up on the table to see what it was, and it was the director.

The story of Salome, the play itself and what it is, what it contains, and my journey as an actor, as a director, as a filmmaker, as a person struggling with whatever I’m struggling with.

Brian De Palma, standing there alone by the surf and they were all waiting for him. And I never forgot that because it represented to me what a director is, what a director does.

I want to become a movie director and win an Academy Award. That’s what I’m trying to do.

Most of the films are only 60% taken, rest is a director’s input.

If you want to be a great director, be a great screenwriter.