I think it's impossible to do Tolkien. It's impossible to get the brilliance of what he wrote about -- just the medium, the book, the novel gives you other areas of imagination (that) film can't allow. Film has to describe and show. With the brilliance of his words and his scenes, you imagine whatever you want. I'm sure various people imagine different things.

When I had my own company on Traffic and Coonskin, all metaphors were able to get to the screen clearly. In Cool World, with the producer and Paramount watchin…

The original concept [of Cool World], way back when I sold the film, was that a live action cartoonist would go to bed with a cartoon woman in the cartoon worl…

Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say.

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.

I was a little overworked. I had been reading a great number of manuscripts in the preceding weeks, and the mere sight of typescript was a burden to me. But be…