It took me forever, learning improvisation, because I had studied with Lee Strasberg - I dropped out of Chicago and went to his classes in New York for a couple of years, once or twice a week. What I didn't realize was I was learning directing because he wasn't all that good about acting, not for me.

You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.

It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.

Payable On Death is actually a banking term, when someone passes on, what someone leaves behind. We related that to Jesus on the cross, and by his death, our sins are paid, the debt is paid. We have salvation if we want it. We got tired of saying Payable On Death, so we went to P.O.D.

In its rather clinical view of death, 'True Grit' rivals the hardboiled world of 'Red Harvest'-era Dashiell Hammett and prefigures Cormac McCarthy by 20 years.

I really connect with those moments of doing missionary work down there and just seeing the people that are dying from disease and hunger and malnutrition.

Why, in our 'free' country, do Americans meekly stand aside and let the state limit our choices, even when we are dying?