You can't give up something you really believe in for financial reasons. If you die by the roadside - so be it. But at least you know you've tried. Ten minutes in the music scene was the equal of one hundred years outside of it.

I had to resign myself many years ago that I'm not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me it really does.

I can see that if this was an album done 10 or 15 years ago we could see we were moving on to some place else.

I mean don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

I had a couple of movies that I was passionately involved with that I could never get made. 'Richard Pryor ' I wrote for - gosh - over a year. That was close to getting made for two-and-a-half years after that. We're still pushing it you know. It is weird. Suddenly you wake up and it's like 'God five years have gone by.'

Life is short. I'm 47 years old. I've got 10 years to go where I can be the best I can be. I want those 10 years to be precious not like before cranking two or three movies a year. I've made a ton of movies in my life but so what?

Of course for many years directors have had to go on the road with their movies and promote them and I've done that since the beginning. So that's not new but the forms of it are different such as with the internet.

The movies I made when I was 14 or 15 I have a hard time looking at those. Those were the awkward years. I don't know if anybody can look at something they did when they were 14 and not wince.

I never stopped studying Buddhism. In the past few years in between movies I do a retreat.

For a number of years I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be which is stupid.