Mark Rydell

Well you're talking about a long career, a lot of movies, a lot of stars. I guess working with Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn was a great privilege.

No one turns down a film with Woody; it's something everyone wants in their career as an important moment. He's such a comedic genius, without question, so I was thrilled.

I long for the days when grosses were not even known. There was no weekend competition.

Now a movie goes out to two, three thousand theaters and by Friday night at 10 o'clock they know if you are in or out. That desperate competition is, I think, horrendous. It's awful.

He's very alive in a scene. He's a very good actor to act with. Even though through most of the picture he's blind, there are many places early in the picture I got to be with him before he was blind. Like convincing him in the office to do the picture.

It's kind of interesting to be a director who is all of a sudden being an actor playing an agent. This is my whole world!

It always amazed me that he was able to do it, and that Orson Welles was able to do it. I never understood it because the talents are absolutely opposite - polar opposites.

It's the unusual leading man. Most of the Hollywood leading men are powerful and capable and strong, heroes. He has this vulnerability, he's fragile, he struggles to find a way to live from day to day that we can identify with, that we can understand.

It perhaps has a chance, a commercial chance, this film. It's funny, it's charming, the idea is original, it's unusual and it makes fun of the movie industry in a way that it needs to be poked fun at.

It's very difficult to break into motion pictures, but it's oddly easier for directors today because of independent films and cable, who have inherited for the most part those films of substance that the studios are reluctant to finance.

There are always at least five good films at the end of the year to get nominated, but generally speaking nowadays, it's more of the independent films that are recognized.

He was a psychotic. He was a borderline psychotic. He was a terrific, sensational actor, with a magical screen presence, you couldn't keep your eyes off him, but he was paranoid. He was sure everybody was out to get him.