I loved being in Close Encounters, just to watch Steven Spielberg working was exciting.

And I think being a good director is being able to be completely tyrannical and you?ve got to be an absolute dictator while at the same time, you have to listen and see everything because it can all change on a dime.

My dad was born in Chicago in 1908... his parents came from Russia. They settled in Chicago, where they lived in a little tiny grocery store with eight or nine children - in the backroom all together - and my grandmother got the idea to go into the movie business.

If anyone would have been paying serious attention to my puppet shows, I would have been sent to therapy very young.

I was very much in my room with my marionette stage, you know, creating these incredibly boring things that I felt were so fascinating, and forcing my relatives to come, and charging money for them to see my little productions.

I think some of the special effects in Close Encounters hold up better than the new more expensive special effects is because they were better actually.

Oh, I was completely hooked on movies and plays and theater from the time I was a day old I was very, very early on in love with movies and I loved plays.

I produced and directed a movie a couple years ago that won some awards that Samuel Goldwyn released called 'The Last Good Time'. I wrote, produced and directed it, but I wasn't in it.

I'm from Chicago, my family started a chain of movie theaters in Chicago that were around for 70 years and then one of them became the head of Paramount and the other was the head of production at MGM and we all came out of Chicago.

I was born on Wellington Avenue and my family that remains lives in the Lake Shore Drive area.

God, I'd love to do a big commercial movie that made a lot of money and whose plot was interesting too.

I'm from the Midwest, and I loved my family. I had a very good time as a child, but I was also - I have a theory about Jews growing up in the Midwest, that there is an ultimately sort of wonderful avoidance of a lot of things, and a great acceptance of whatever is happening.