For me, no word comes without prior thought. No sentence is generated without effort. No formulation is made automatically. I am faced continually with a mystery that other people have no conception of, the mystery of the generation of speech. There is no command situation, it goes back and back and back. Where the self lies at the heart of the utterance, the speaker generating the word, is always clouded. This is true for everyone, but for most people this is not something to think about. The generation of words is automatic. For me, that automatic link is broken. Word generation involves strain, guesswork, difficulty, imprecision.

I tried to get funding to shoot this film and couldn’t—nobody wanted to touch it, you know?

More than anything else, I had to combat the barriers, and we tore down those barriers. I just had to set a sail against the wind, those strong winds, to end segregation and racial discrimination, but somehow, in some way, I didn’t let those barriers keep me down.

In terms of this issue of these industrial gases affecting the environment, at the beginning the road was not easy, because we were suggesting that society had to change, that industries had to do something different than they were doing at that time. And of course, initially we did not meet with a good reception to these ideas from industry. And even from the scientific community — even though our ideas were well received in the small group of specialists in what we were doing — it was not necessarily well received by the scientific community at large. So we really had to continue doing as good a science as we could, and at the same time trying to well communicate our conviction that it was something important, something that had to change in the way society was functioning.

The world would say it was failure. But the difference was so small between us. They played great, but they lost.

The person who has inspired me my whole life is my Mom, because she taught me commitment. She sacrificed. We weren’t dirt poor, but we weren’t real rich or anything. I would always have what I needed, and when I looked in her closet, she would have two dresses. She taught me to be outside of yourself, to get outside of yourself, and to be committed to somebody. That’s the same thing that I try to teach. Throughout my life, my mom has been the person that I’ve always looked up to. She never went to high school. I remember, in an old Polish way, she said, “Mike, I went to the eighth grade twice because the teacher liked me.” She had great, self-effacing humor, and loved life. I really admire her.