I have never been sorry to see my sets being struck, provided they are well photographed. They're not works of art but part of making a film.

With Kubrick and most film directors, they are in complete control, but one can influence them.

It takes courage to stay young, to make your enthusiasms work for you. Don't let anyone drag you down.

One thing that I think works in 'Casablanca' and which I've lectured a lot about - in terms of what I've been trying to achieve as a designer - is the film's creation of its own form of reality.

My dad was a theater major, and he's acted, and he's done so much television and radio and film, and seeing how much fun he had doing that totally made me want to try.

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.

I've done a show at the Largo Theater called The 'Thrilling Adventure Hour.' We read, like, radio teleplays. It's a send-up of radio dramas from the '30s and '40s. We just did a Kickstarter for that so that we can do a web series and a concert film.

We are the only living creatures who can create a context, and as far as we know, everything else can only follow a context, without recognizing the context as such. Herein lies the source of creativity and the genuinely new.