Gena tells everyone that it’s hard to live with me because there is nothing she can say that I don’t write down. I see Gena around the house and with the kids and I tape record what I see. I do tape record things and exaggerate them and blow them up and the incidents are not the same. I mean, I’m not a writer at all! I just record what I hear. As prattle. What people are concerned with in a day’s living. I have a good ear for prattle. Every line in your life is eaten up by the movies you do.

After Minnie and Moskowitz, I thought, ‘All right, I would like to make a picture to really say something.’ The most important thing in my life, in Gena’s life and in the lives of our intimate friends was the idea of marriage. We were deeply concerned with the change in illusions that marriage engenders over a period of years and the overwhelming need to understand the problems of retaining the family. Out of that came the characters, the feelings for the characters and, in a more specific sense, the complex delineation of the woman in the film.

The film was born out of my despair and questioning of the meaning of my life. As I thought about this, and, later, during the filming, I became very conscious of certain problems that were unknown and foreign to me. I’ll use anything I can to straighten out a problem – even write a movie about it. When I finally saw the finished film, I was shocked by the reality of these problems.

Usually we put film in such simple terms while being endlessly involved in talking about our personal experience. We admit how complex it is. But it’s as though we never look into a mirror and see what we are. So the films I make really are trying to mirror that emotion so we can understand what our impulses are; why we do things that get us into trouble; when to worry about it; when to let them go. And maybe we can find something in ourselves that is worthwhile. Look at it this way: if I were writing a picture and I used a situation which none of us were involved in or interested in, then I’d feel ashamed about doing it – and so would everybody else. So I use absolutely everything I can find in our own lives, in our friends’ lives, to make what we’re doing interesting. But you’d better do it honestly, and you’d better cure all those personal problems that might be holding back something you want to say.

There’s a very small part of all of us that has any kind of value. I think there’s a small part of us that says we’d like to say something better than what is usually said, on the purest level. And the rest of it is con-men and struggling people just like everyone else – where you’re constantly humiliated and go through your life, even if you’re not humiliated, thinking you are. And then you get very lucky and you meet a group of creative people that are very much like you who are locked up in their own selves, trying to come out, trying in some way to express something that is very personal to them. And then suddenly one thing develops and another thing develops, and Gena has a fantastic day and we respond to it and Peter has a fantastic day, and the rest of the actors come in and they want to do something, and it all happens out of a day-by-day situation and a commitment. The commitment comes and grows more and more into something, that little part of you that isn’t a con-man, and all of us get better as a result of making that picture and the picture then has no importance really until you then see it or someone sees it and says, ‘Yeah, that’s all right. That was good.’ Or somebody’s very touched or somebody’s bitter, and then ideas that we never even had seen, collectively, suddenly someone sees.

One of the reasons I make films is to make clear to people that family life is not always going to be a bed of roses. Don’t be upset if you fall out of love, because it’s gonna happen lots of times. Don’t be upset by conflict. The film shows that there is something to a one-on-one relationship, something so beautiful that it is worth all the problems. There is in some ways a greater value to family life, and that is something that hasn’t been said since Andy Hardy. Everything is so negative! No matter how ‘horrible’ the love story was, it really was a love story and not just a chance meeting and a two-second love affair. Nick and Mabel, with all their problems, and they have a million, were more comfortable with each other than they were with anyone else. And when they were alone I don’t know if there were two people who liked and respected each other more than any two people I’ve ever seen.

If somebody says there’s an art picture – I don’t want to go! They usually mean it’s beautifully shot, or they used certain techniques, or it’s about loneliness, an empty room with beautiful lighting. And somebody walks through and you hear some eerie music. Very few things come out of the people themselves or their own frustrations. I’m not a highbrow or an intellectual. I’m a street person. I just really believe that all the things that I can think everybody else can feel. I’m not shooting through rainbows or glasses or anything like that, just taking life and saying what is my problem. The greatest thrill for me is that an uneducated person like me can look at the film we make and understand we were making it for him. It aggravates me when people say, ‘You make intellectual films.’ I’m not an intellectual!

Yet I believe in art. I believe in it in the movies, in music and in fine art, where it can become a great investment. What’s all this about certain stories being commercial and others not? People in the movies should go on strike for quality, not money. In this country we’re not really in love with films, are we? I mean, we’re really in love with some kind of attitudes to success, and it’s a sad truth because then there doesn’t seem to be room for the students of film. That’s a sad commentary, not on the greed, but on the numbers game and on the new art of American life, the only all-consuming art, the art of business. So that supposing you don’t want to be in that art, you want to be in another art – of self-expression – then there’s no outlet.

I see people like Bob Altman, Elaine May, Elia Kazan – great directors. These people shouldn’t be left alone. Somewhere along the line there has to be somebody who makes things easier. Not someone who says like most distributors, ‘Can you do it? Can you be a killer? Can you pretend that everything is right?’ The one difference between the film industry now and the old days is that back then nobody had a responsibility to make a great film. They had a responsibility to sucker in the big guys, band together and have fun on their own small level. Through that, the accidents of great films occurred because the love was always there. All those guys had pride in making a good film, if only to be able to say, ‘Well, our picture was good at least.’ No one thought in terms of millions of dollars. Now the big question is, ‘Can a picture make a hundred million?’ Who the hell cares? If you’re thinking that way, you’re not making films, you’re making money. If that’s what it’s come to, let the audience look at pictures of money, put money on the screen, and then rape it, shoot it, defecate on it – because that’s basically what everyone is doing. I’m not really an angry person, but I get angry when I see people of extraordinary talent and ability abused so terribly by the majors who defile anything.

There are blockbusting pictures that have been heavily promoted. The audience looks for deeper meaning because these films are sociologically acceptable. The better movies do not give you acceptable meanings. I think that consequently the audience has lost its taste. There’s too much emphasis on how successful each and every picture should be. You’re really doing an experiment and no matter how hard I work or you work on something, it’s just one thing out of billions and trillions of things. It shouldn’t have that much importance placed on it. To be forced to have that much importance forces films out of a productive area for both the people that make them and the people that view them.

The films are a road map through emotional and intellectual terrains that provide a solution to how one can save pain. As people we know that we are petty, vicious, violent and horrible, but my films make an effort to contain the depression within us and to limit the depression to those areas that we can actually solve. They represent the assertion of a human spirit. If, along the way, in A Woman Under the Influence you find something that you didn’t know before or if you find something out about people that you might have thought one way about and then possibly might think another way about, then it has some value. An experience that leaves the spectator vacant is not art.

I could never make an unrealistic type of picture; I cannot work that way, but I admire people who can. I think Frank Capra is wonderful, and I think many of the early Lubitsch films were great. I even admire Dick Powell and his detective stories; he’s wonderfully talented in those areas and it’s a good thing he can make that kind of picture so that we can have a little variety. It would be awfully somber if people made only realistic films. However, that’s the best way I can work and if there’s no market for it then I’ll pack up as it’s the only kind of film I am interested in. I’d rather work in a sewer than make a film I don’t love. If I directed a picture like Return of the Jedi or even worked on one, I would faint – I’d faint and never get up again I’d be so ashamed. If I did The Towering Inferno it’d be all black leader. Nothing. I’d get sick. I’d take the insurance money. I couldn’t do it. I’m not interested in starting fires. I like to feel pain through what really causes pain. I don’t want to frighten people by showing them tragedy. I’ve never seen an exploding helicopter, I’ve never seen anybody go and blow somebody’s head off. So why should I make films about them? But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way. I’ve seen people withdraw. I’ve seen people hide behind political ideas, behind dope, behind the sexual revolution, behind fascism, behind hypocrisy, and I’ve myself done all these things. In our films what we are saying is so gentle. It’s gentleness. We have problems, terrible problems, but our problems are human problems. I like to deal with subjects of divorce, subjects of children being battered. I don’t know – you can say, ‘Please, there is no problem at all, I’m American and I know there’s no problem here, nothing’s ever touched me!’