Which relationships did you tend well, and which did you neglect while other things felt urgent?

That's important too. Because everyone has to have an outlet. Otherwise you can get so involved in your job, or any one thing, that you're not a very well-balanced person, and you're not happy either, normally. I think it's very important to take up an avocation. Sports — that was mine.

It was only with her help that I did everything. The tragedy was that after 40 years of marriage she died of cancer. I say that if Martin and I had not married the little country girls we married from Alabama, you never would have heard our names.

They become almost like your children. Next to your own flesh and blood, you get very close to them. Their joys are your joys, their sorrows are your sorrows and that goes on forever. It doesn't end when they leave your supervision. That's with you forever.

it's not profound regret. It's just a wiping up of tiny, little messes that you didn't recognize as a mess when they were going on

they are much more ready to put their family and their children first in a way that I regret that I didn't do.

the harder part is the living in relationship, the living it out, the consistently trying to do what I call deep listening, listening to the needs around me, listening to what I'm — where we're being nudged and drawn, listening to people's stories, listening to the murmurs inside of me.

Roll up your sleeves and work as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in a lunatic asylum or a machine operator in a slaughterhouse. Drive a taxi for six months and you’ll have enough money to make a film. Walk on foot, learn languages and a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking — like great literature — must have experience of life at its foundation. Read Conrad or Hemingway and you can tell how much real life is in those books.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.