Barry Levinson

“I got a chance to work with Mel Brooks on two of his films: Silent Movie and High Anxiety.”

“The public doesn't know what to believe anymore. We don't know what stories are supposedly true, this idea of 'fake news.' We watch it on what I guess you would call a split-focus. It's half entertainment and half mystery.”

“You can never squash something and assume it's not going to come back in some fashion. It's going to bubble up until it explodes. Society evolves to find a better way.”

“'Wag' is not some kind of documentary; it's just looking at the tools that are available. Now you've got more tools - you've got social media - and just post stories through all types of back channels that can get some traction.”

“Some actors are supposed to be very difficult, but I've not found that to be the situation.”

“We are a divided nation in the worst sense of the word, and we don't hear the other side.”

“How do I make the son, daughter, wife of Paterno interesting? Then you just have to start seeing people.”

“Well it was sent to me, well because almost everything that is written in Baltimore is sent to me. And David Simon, who was a writer for the Baltimore Sun, spent one year following the homicide squad in Baltimore and he chronicled that period of time.”

“The more pressure that an actor puts on himself, the harder it is to deliver behavior that's interesting, and so I just try to find a way without talking too much.”

“You just start going through that process of trying to put together a cast that works. I don't know that I can explain it in a way that you can go, 'Oh.' It's a little bit like saying, 'How would he be with him? How does that feel?'”

“You used to need a big camera to direct, but now, anyone with an iPhone can tell a story visually. You can film something. You can start off with a five-minute story, then a 10-minute story.”

“It gets harder and harder to make movies about human beings. These movies are like an endangered species. Everything is 'simplify, simplify' now. How many movies have sub-plots anymore?”

“My advice is that it's easier to write than direct. If you have an interest in writing, write. You might as well start with yourself or some event you know well, and you need a point of view.”

“Apparently nobody really read it, it was a cheap movie, it fit their schedule in terms of things so fine, let the guy make that high school comedy. I used to work with Mel Brooks so they figured oh it's going to be one of those really silly movies and that's how it got made.”

“The business has changed, and some people can keep talking about theatrical in these wondrous terms - it will survive, but it becomes narrower what you can make. So the films I'm most interested in, studios - or even the independents - aren't making them. I'm mostly interested in people.”

“A lot of time mistakes are very interesting - you look for the behaviour that's not the one you expect.”

“Paterno had that almost legendary reputation, and then all of a sudden, the scandal broke. Why would I be interested? You can't quite figure it out at face value.”

“You can't tell the story of the thousands of people whose lives were destroyed by Bernie Madoff because there are thousands of stories. What you can do is to start inside, and that's the picture that you do, which becomes like a Greek tragedy in that regard - that whole collapse.”

“I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.”

“The interesting thing about movies, it's not always - y'know, you have to have structure etc and all those things, but an audience responds, in many ways, we walk away and certain things stay in our heads that are memorable.”