Barry Levinson

The business has changed, and some people can keep talking about theatrical in these wondrous terms - it will survive, but it becomes narrower what you can make. So the films I'm most interested in, studios - or even the independents - aren't making them. I'm mostly interested in people. ”

Paterno had that almost legendary reputation, and then all of a sudden, the scandal broke. Why would I be interested? You can't quite figure it out at face value. ”

Apparently nobody really read it, it was a cheap movie, it fit their schedule in terms of things so fine, let the guy make that high school comedy. I used to work with Mel Brooks so they figured oh it's going to be one of those really silly movies and that's how it got made. ”

My advice is that it's easier to write than direct. If you have an interest in writing, write. You might as well start with yourself or some event you know well, and you need a point of view. ”

I'm thinking, this is Robert Redford. You know, he's won an Academy Award, he's talking to me about directing a movie he's in. So you just think that it's Hollywood stuff or whatever. ”

You can't tell the story of the thousands of people whose lives were destroyed by Bernie Madoff because there are thousands of stories. What you can do is to start inside, and that's the picture that you do, which becomes like a Greek tragedy in that regard - that whole collapse. ”

We are a divided nation in the worst sense of the word, and we don't hear the other side. ”

The public doesn't know what to believe anymore. We don't know what stories are supposedly true, this idea of 'fake news.' We watch it on what I guess you would call a split-focus. It's half entertainment and half mystery. ”

When I began to think about the head of the family, the storyteller, the rise of television which became the new storyteller, the break-up of the American family as an idea and then Avalon came. ”

It gets harder and harder to make movies about human beings. These movies are like an endangered species. Everything is 'simplify, simplify' now. How many movies have sub-plots anymore? ”