And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.
Burt Lancaster was largely responsible for me becoming a director.
But, I went away to New York, and I went to a very good acting school, by sheer luck, not because I was smart or knew about it.
But, I've made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.
But, something about film has to do with the immediacy of what the 20th Century is.
By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that's led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do.
Every single art form is involved in film, in a way.
Film is a collective experience, as you know.
For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don't know that George Washington would be a president today, I don't know that Abe Lincoln would, I don't know that Roosevelt would.
From my point of view I work just as hard, I care just as much, if the films fail it doesn't make me suddenly disown them, it just doesn't.
I didn't believe that I'd ever be lucky enough to be able to make a living as an actor.
I didn't grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.
I didn't have the faintest idea Tootsie would be a hit, or Out Of Africa would be a hit, or The Firm would be a hit. You don't know. You just don't know.
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 mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.
I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.
I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.
I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.
I mean, the truth of the matter is, I like the failures as much as I like the successes, it's only the world that doesn't like the failures.
I personally have never made a movie in Hollywood, because I don't want to get up in my own bed and then go to the movie set, and then come home at night to my real life.
I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.
I would go back and make Havana again if it came to me, I would go back and make Random Hearts, both pictures were failures.
I'm hands-on in areas where I can make a difference. There's no sense in me standing on set; the director doesn't need me there.
I've produced my own films for twenty years now - it means I have to talk to less people.
No, I never went to college. Always regretted it, always envied people who did.
Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.
So when I finish that picture I've done a sort of graduate course in that field, in that area, that's highly motivated.
That's right, I studied with a man named Sanford Meissner, and I studied dance with Martha Graham, and all these people taught at this wonderful school called the Neighborhood Playhouse.
The director is the teller of the film, the director tells the movie, like you would tell a story, except in this case you're telling a movie.
The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.
Then I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and left there right out of high school, I was interested in acting, I thought.
We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.
Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies.
Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.
Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.
When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.
With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.
You are not an active creator of the film.
You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.
You know, essentially when you do a play you're reinterpreting a work of art that already exists. That's not what happens with a movie.
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