I wanted to keep exploring... I'm not about to choose a series of movies in which I can use the same bag of tricks and style that I used in the first film.

I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane Chandler Jim Thompson and noir movies like Fuller Orson Welles Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I went to film school and wanted to learn everything there was about making movies.

I loved the movies and I wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe. I thought she was so glamorous and everyone seemed to love her. I wanted to be like that and I told everyone I would be the next Marilyn Monroe.

Well getting behind the camera is something I've always wanted to get involved with. Ever since I was doing movies like 'Zathura' I was very interested in all the different jobs on set and kind of soaking all the information up like a sponge.

I was a total athlete. I loved sports but when I realized I wasn't going to be a professional athlete I realized I wanted to be in movies.

I loved old black and white movies especially the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals. I loved everything about them - the songs the music the romance and the spectacle. They were real class and I knew that I wanted to be in that world.

I didn't know what types of movies I wanted to do. I want to do things that are different. I want to take my time with each role.

I enjoy sports. I get a real joy from playing sports but I don't look for those movies. Oliver Stone wanted to know if I would do Any Given Sunday and it just didn't appeal to me.

I'm an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He's somebody along with Vincent Price who I celebrate and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre.

I think ever since I was preteen I wanted to direct movies and tell stories.

I've always wanted to make movies.

I just knew that was what I wanted to do. I was going to perform as a singer I was going to perform as a dancer and I was you know going to do movies and be an actress. I was going to do it or die trying. That's what my life was.

How many movies do you see when you can say this director really knew what film he wanted to make? I can count them on the fingers of one hand.

If I wanted to make spy movies for the rest of my life that would be one thing but I don't want to just make spy movies.

I always wanted to make movies.

I wanted to be in Jim Carrey comedy movies before I met him. I wanted to be a comedian on Stage 19 yukking it up.

People feel the worst film I made was 'Jack.' But to this day when I get checks from old movies I've made 'Jack' is one of the biggest ones. No one knows that. If people hate the movie they hate the movie. I just wanted to work with Robin Williams.

I wanted to write and direct movies and not be forced to adapt them from a bestselling book.

I was always raised on cowboy films and then when I could start making choices about the movies I wanted to watch I found myself wanting to watch gangster films which were slightly more sophisticated than the baseline stuff that was in westerns.

I wanted to do another movie that could make us laugh and cry and feel good about the world. I wanted to do something else that could make us smile. This is a time when we need to smile more and Hollywood movies are supposed to do that for people in difficult times.

In the morning he was lying dead on one of the beds fully clothed. He was dead. I got the impression he wanted to go and I must have killed him. I can't remember strangling him. I just sat there shocked.

I didn't know that I could do a talk show. I didn't know that we could bring variety to daytime. I didn't know that people wanted to see singing and dancing and comedy in the morning.