 As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting. |
| You gotta make the movie you want to make. |
| I mean, Scorsese's a genius, and that's one way of shooting. |
| Sometimes it's difficult directing yourself on film because you can't quite separate yourself from the subject. |
| I like to use all of myself, and acting wasn't doing that. |
| I make time to write. |
| I was always attracted to the past as a kid. |
| And I love doing my own projects; that's what I've always wanted to do. |
| It's more interesting because you get to research the history of the period, and all the different aesthetic elements that make a film, particularly this film, so stunning. |
| The thing is, I'm a very practical filmmaker. |
| I write in the mornings. During my down time. |
| I would rather just do the things I want to do. |
| Like Joseph Mitchell, I would scour the streets of New York and find little pieces of what other people think of as junk - and collect it. |
| I didn't know you had to change diapers so often. I couldn't believe it - we must change them 10 times a day - each. So that's 20 diapers a piece a day. |
| When I write a screenplay, and when I direct, I always pull lines out. |
| I'm actually one who will encourage directors to cut my lines. |
| I wanted to be an actor when I was a kid. |
| Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote. |
| So yes, I hope to act in other people's movies, big and small, because that's how I make my living, really. |
| The constraints of melodrama can be a great blessing, because they demand that all the characters involved - as absurd and extreme as they may initially seem - must stay utterly rooted in their own reality, or the whole project collapses. |
