Jazz is a big thing with me. It's a very big passion of mine, to play it. I'm an amateur musician and I love everything about it. I was obsessed with jazz when I was 15 years old and I know a lot about it because I've loved it so much.
I can understand that an audience, buying a ticket to see a picture of mine, wants to see something funny because they feel confident that at least I have a fighting chance to make a funny film when I make a film, whereas if I make a dramatic film there's one chance in a thousand that it's really going to come out great, so I understand how they feel about that and they're completely right.
I like filming in New York a lot myself, but London is accommodating to me; the weather's very good there and the conditions for shooting and the financial conditions, the artistic conditions are good, so it's a pleasant place to shoot.
I'm a terrible musician. While the band members are great, I'm tolerated and affectionately regarded because I do movies, but if I had to make my living as a musician I would starve. I'm like a Sunday tennis player.
I always write the same way. I always write with a yellow pad and a ballpoint pen on my bed. And then I go and type it up afterwards. I've always done that. Those things become habitual.
I was raised in a religious home. It was unreasonable enforced religion that turned me off it. It was a joyless, unpleasant, stupid, barbaric thing when I was a child and I've never gotten over that feeling. If you're talking about religion it's one thing; I don't hold Jewish religion with any more seriousness than I would any other.
Once the movie's over, there's not much point. When the thing is edited, mixed, and color-corrected, and you've finished it... In my case, I never read anything about it, I never think about it.
I don't like to reminisce much, and my walls don't have photographs of me and the actors I was with, or any of that stuff... I try and keep that disciplined, and just work. There are so many traps you can get into, and looking back on your own work is certainly one of them.
I never knew what Amazon was. I've never seen any of those series, even on cable. I've never seen The Sopranos, or Mad Men. I'm out every night and when I come home, I watch the end of the baseball or basketball game, and there's Charlie Rose and I go to sleep.
Paris is particularly beautiful in the rain. It was just a nice experience for me, a pleasant experience, and I was able to present it to the world through my eyes, very subjectively - not realistically, but subjectively.
I've been escaping my whole life. Since I was a little child, I escaped into the movies on the other side as an audience member. I escaped by going into the movies and sitting in the movies all day long.
I always feel, I guess being a product of the movies of the 40s where movies were the greatest things and screens were big and palaces were palaces and stars were larger than life that reality was so much inferior to what we felt was conceivably possible from what we had seen in the movies.
When I naturally write a story and I feel that the guy is sitting across the table from the girl and flirting with her... I think, 'God, that can't be me' because I'm just too old for that part. You need a 30-year-old or a 35-year-old for that part. And so I've given myself less and less roles.
I wish my parents had raised me in Manhattan because I think it's the greatest thing you can do for a kid is to raise them in New York City. I can see this with my own children.
Paris is a very exciting city. I learned about Paris the same way that Americans do: from the movies.
I keep getting more and more ambitious. Over the years, to some degree, in some areas, I feel I've grown. In some areas, I made a fool of myself. In some areas, I think I can still do some funny things.
I didn't go to Paris until I was a grown-up in 1965. And when I went to Paris, it was the Paris I knew only from American movies.
You look up after many years and you find that a film has become a classic because it's meaningful to people and alive, decade after decade.
I like broad comedy. If I had an idea tomorrow for a film that was all slapstick and broad comedy, and it was an idea that interested me, I would not hesitate to do it because I enjoy watching these kinds of film.
Throughout history in the theater and film people do like sarcastic characters, and they do like curmudgeons - if they're amusing, they do like them despite the fact that they're vitriolic, particularly if they're for the right thing. If you can see that the person is a decent person and is for the right thing, and is not just a nasty person with base motives, but someone who is a decent human but expresses himself.
