There isn't a studio in the world that wouldn't burn half its soundstages to get a Tom Cruise movie.

Every film I've made has a kind of frustrated love story in the center of it. They were people who saw life from opposing points of view, which has been in every film I've ever done. It had all the ingredients of the kinds of films I like to do.

When you rehearse a play, you spend four weeks with one goal in mind -- to wean the actor away from you. You want the actor to become completely independent and to understand all the emotional and psychological moves within the character.

You have to go by your instincts in casting.

It's a terrible mistake when it gets to be a contest of egos. The actor is always going to win. If a director gets into a control situation and is overbearing, it's deadly.

Every story needs an element of suspense -- or it's lousy.

Everybody's trying to make blockbusters.

There's a religious basis to their Bush and Chaney kind of conservatism. It's rooted in a kind of fundamentalism. I'm afraid of that. I don't like that idea. I think all extremism is suspect.

Stanley Kubrick was a fascinating, larger than life guy who had been a friend for many years prior to our working together on that film. I found the best part of working with him to be the long conversations we had between set-ups.

For reasons which I can't logically explain, in all of the films I've done, I've ended up doing love stories of one kind or another, and it seems to me that love stories are extremely dependent on the obstacles you can place between the lovers. There is no love story without it.

I've always thought of Denys Finch Hatton as a combination of Hubbell Gardner from 'The Way We Were' and Jeremiah Johnson. He is this ultimate individualist.

What makes architecture extraordinary is that you're looking at the building, but your peripheral vision is also seeing how it fits within a space. And it's seeing more than one part of the building at one time.

If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.

I fly an aeroplane, and I think a lot about how much I do not want ever to run into an optimistic air traffic controller. I just don't. I want a guy down there who's just waiting for the worst crash possible and petrified that it's going to happen on his watch. And then I feel safe flying into his territory.

I'm not trying to push my political agenda on anybody. I'll do that like any other citizen by giving money to a party or candidate I believe in. I don't mind going out and endorsing somebody I believe in. But when we're talking about my films, I don't think my politics should have anything to do with it.

People ask me over and over how is it that I work with stars. How do you work with Barbra Streisand, with Paul Newman, with Al Pacino, with Sally Field, Jane Fonda, you work with all these people. Isn't this a problem? And it isn't a problem at all. It's terrific. It's great fun. And I don't know what the answer is.

Good actors aren't enough. You need charisma. Can you imagine 'Casablanca' without Bogart and Bergman?

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 don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.

I tend to be what I would call more progressive than conservative, but I think either extreme is excessive.