There was a saying around MGM: "Norma Shearer got the productions, Greta Garbo supplied the art, and Joan Crawford made the money to pay for both".
I was saying to myself that I would love to try it once, just one time, to know what it's like to make a movie in Hollywood. I was so curious because most of my favorite directors were there. There's a history; there's a way of working.
When they were making black films in the '60s and the '70s, everyone knew their place, if you get my drift. You understand? Everyone knew the rules, and everyone knew their place. Everyone knew what to say. They had the written rules in Hollywood film, and the unwritten rules.
My first exposure to what Hollywood was like, behind the scenes, was when Joel Silver started screaming at Roger Rabbit at the beginning of 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit.'
I think that, oftentimes, what people say is, 'We need an actress who'll be able to greenlight a movie,' and my counterargument to that is always that, when it comes to a teen movie, you have very few people who can greenlight a movie.
It's so hard to raise money for independent films and the fact of the matter is that the bigger my star or whatever is, as a result of doing bigger pictures, the easier it is for me to get money for my own projects.
Obviously if you're Coppola going into 'Apocalypse Now' off the back of the two 'Godfathers,' you're in a much better position than coming off the back of something like 'Dust Devil,' which had scarcely been released, and was pretty much lying around in film cans in different places.
My last picture for Warners was Romance on the High Seas. It was Doris Day's first picture; that was before she became a virgin.
I feel like a survivor from an age that people no longer understand. I want to try to explain what the 1930s - the golden age of Hollywood - was truly like. People forget that America was such a different place then, not yet the dominant force in the world.
Financiers don't support their directors to cast properly. They don't have the vision of an artist. They're casting to spreadsheets, and it's making movies very mediocre. The movie business used to just be called the movies. Now it should be the business movies.
The film, even when we were making it in that budget range, which was really a coup - we got it made because we pitched it to the studio head, Joe Roth.
Fact is, awards shows were never really about recognizing achievement. They were a publicity ploy cooked up in the late 1920s by MGM topper Louie Mayer and his newly formed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which was itself, back in the day, nothing but a front organization to discourage unionizing.
What I learned from my go-round with 'In the Heights' is that it's tough to make a movie. In Hollywood, even the people in charge have people in charge.
The quality of mainstream cinema has changed. A lot of independent voices feel they can leave everything behind and make independent films.
A lot of Hollywood films tend to be bloated, bombastic, loud. At the same time, I do like the infrastructure of making a blockbuster; it's like having a big train set.
We should never forget that Hollywood was built by Europeans, and the old Jewish boys from Eastern Europe.
Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.
The heads of the studios, like Louis B. Mayer, didn't want to create any more musical stars. So Bobby [Fosse] left and went to New York City to be a choreographer, and created brilliant work.
I am not a cult director at all. I make Hollywood movies.
The Joan Crawford that I've heard about in 'Mommie Dearest' is not the Joan Crawford I knew back when.
In his musicals with Garland, Rooney was the sparkplug for prodigious entrepreneurship - that era's predecessor of the garage band, but with Gershwin tunes and an all-star cast.
During the Hollywood studio system, they looked for people who were unusual. The stars had peculiarities.
Film is not a national business. It's international. And its centre will always be Hollywood.
When you make a film for a million and a half dollars and it opens at 20 million, the next question out of everyone's mouth is, 'When's the next one, when's the next one, when's the next one?'
I terribly miss - we all miss, I think - somebody like the great producer Irving Thalberg. He had a foot in both camps: He understood us creative people. And he understood the money people.
