I didn't like England. I couldn't take the look of the place or the style of friendship. I need more intimacy from people than is considered okay there and I felt that my personality and my enthusiasms weren't understood. I had to put a big lid on myself.

I've never let producers tell me what to do. Even when I was making television I always did what I wanted to do and if I couldn't I didn't do it. It was a freedom that these days young directors starting out don't have.

I couldn't relate to kid stuff. 'Jimmy doesn't like me!' Who cares? I was worried we didn't have gas money or food. Those were my concerns.

'The Food Network' was just starting in New York and I was getting lots of attention from Mesa Grill. They had no money so if you couldn't get there by subway you couldn't be on. It wasn't like TV was something I really wanted to do - but I knew it would be great publicity for my restaurants.

Well it's very easy for me to gain weight but even though I tried not eating for a week when I was really young I couldn't do it any longer because I liked my food too much.

I wanted to make Jerusalem as feature film. But we couldn't finance it only through theatrical release we couldn't get all the money we needed. We had to get some money from television. So we said ok let's do it both ways. So we did it in four parts.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data but we couldn't see any.

Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward to have a low threshold of fear because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

I totally related to Cole Porter's magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room which he was famous for doing as was Gershwin. You couldn't drag them away from a piano.

It was a mixed blessing to have famous parents. It was tough to go to auditions and be bad since I couldn't be anonymous.