Before she married my father, my mother was a film reviewer for The Akron Beacon Journal - a small newspaper.

I negotiate my deals with a loaded shotgun. They were not on the set of the film.

My father was one of 11. He was an attorney. My mother worked for the Syracuse newspaper as a columnist before she became a stay-at-home mother.

I like to rehearse with the actors scenes that are not in the script and will not be in the film because what we're really doing is trying to establish their character, and good acting to me is about reacting.

I didn't get the degree because in my last year, for my thesis film I made a feature called Permanent Vacation and they'd given me a scholarship, the Louis B Mayer fellowship and they made a mistake.

My mother was a great believer in reincarnation — she believed she and my father had been married many times before. She always said 'Next time, I'll be the artist and he'll do the rest.