"Movies are like haircuts. They seemed like a good idea but you don't want to see a picture of it later. It's like, fashion changes and things change, and your face changes. The things that you want from... It isn't important any more. I have a very different opinion of what the life of a movie is. I used to think it was all about its first release. Get the film to the premiere, wash your hands of it and then see how it does in its first circle of the globe. I honestly don't feel like that any more. I feel like you read a script and it becomes a film for you in your head. And there's no faces attached to it. Or maybe there are, maybe you read it with actors in mind. But you're reading it with this kind of ideal. You're seeing this ideal. This person's able to bring X, Y and Z to this thing. And then you cast the movie and you go into rehearsals, and then it takes on a different life. Takes on the reality of you're got to tell a story, you have this much time and you have to do this, this and this. You're catching somebody at a time in their life when this thing that you're counting on them bringing to it, that they're brought to this other project that's similar, they don't want to explore that any more, they're done with that. So they're moving on to this other thing. Sometimes, where they're going is better than what you have in mind. So you incorporate that and it changes the balance of this other thing. Rehearsals change a movie.

Then you shoot it and now you're taking all of those possibilities, taking all of this potential, and you're compressing it and forcing it in this box of time. So time and reality compress this thing into the exploration of one or two of these ideas that heretofore have been limitless. Then you cut it and it becomes a completely different movie. Now you're losing things in terms not of where an actor can go, but what an audience will sit still for. With regards to where an actor or where a perfomance wants to go, how much of it is necessary? How much of it is unnecessary? Now there's this whole other constraint, this narrative, storytelling essential kind of box gets put around it. So the box has got smaller and smaller and changed every time. Then you put the music on it and it becomes a different movie. It evolves into this other thing. Then you put it in front of a premiere audience and these all agents and producers, and other actors and other directors, and they all watch it, but they're watching it from this... They got off work early to come see your thing, and had to walk past people taking their pictures. So there's all these weird tensions. So this movie has this whole other life. And then, six weeks after the movie opens, it's in the dollar theatres, or whatever, on Beverly Boulevard. You go in and you see it with 15 people in the room. It's a completely different... They're bringing a completely different thing to it. They're not paying eight bucks to see it, they're paying two bucks. They're seeing it in the middle of the afternoon, expecting less or more, or something else than the people who saw it at the premiere, or the people who were supposed to judge it at the preview screenings. It then goes to laserdisc ten years later, people look at it and haven't seen the trailers and they're not being hyped, they're not being promised these things, and all of a sudden they're watching the movie the way you first read the script, which is with zero expectation and with no understanding. So movies never stop having a life.

Whereas I used to think I'm working towards premiere night. I'm working towards that showing. Now I'm feeling more like you do what you think is right. You're trying to make something that's the truest expression of what it is and then get out of the way and get back, and stop worrying about it. I take responsibility for my actions while I'm actually doing it and then I try to let it go as quickly and completely as possible".

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