When I was a kid, we'd go to the movies, and my parents would reach out to everyone around us in the theater, most of whom could barely afford the movie ticket. They'd hand out popcorn and Milk Duds, strike up conversations with them, lend shoulders to cry on, learn their names, and smile at everyone.

I was born in Paris in the mid-1960s, and by the time I was 12 I had started going to the movies by myself. Most of the movies of that period never appealed to me. I didn't like the 'naturalism,' the sad or the 'down-to-earth' characters. What I wanted from film was fantasy, dreams, funny situations, extravagant decor - and beautiful women.

I don't think I could compare myself to Macaulay Culkin, because we're pretty much two different kinds of actors. He's done a lot of comedy. He does mostly just comedy like 'Uncle Buck' and 'Home Alone' and 'Home Alone 2.' And I've done a lot of different stuff, like sad movies, like the movie about the kid with AIDS.

'Sunset Boulevard' - the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair - is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties.

I'm a person who likes these sort of movies... sad but moving 'art movies' that normally are at a festival and then they go to a small art house theater and disappear.

Film-makers are always going to be interested in making movies that plug into society around them. That's what a vibrant, artistically alert community should be doing. After all, it would be sad if we only made films about alien robots.

I happen to be interested in watching a face age. I like faces of women aging so it makes me personally quite sad. That's a beautiful gift from God. If people don't want to see that anymore then I won't be in anymore movies.

It's sad that women characters have lost so much ground in popular movies. Didn't 'Thelma and Louise' prove that women want to see women doing things on film? Thelma and Louise were in a classic car; they were being chased by cops; they shot up a truck - and women loved it.

I think it's sad that movies and television have caused the theatre to fade as a popular art form. I hope to get young people into the theatre and expose them to Shakespeare.

I so desperately hate to end these movies that the first thing I do when I'm done is write another one. Then I don't feel sad about having to leave and everybody going away.

I never get scared making these kinds of movies because it's all make-believe, but I did cry when I saw the finished version of Man On Fire because it is so sad.

There are very few movies in English about romantic obsession told with a seriousness of purpose.

I find L.A. kind of romantic, actually. As a movie junkie, it's a city that was built by the movies. There's something really weird and surreal about it that I find energizing.

With female-oriented movies, unless it's something like 'Bridesmaids' or a romantic comedy, you've got to really worry about your opening weekend. And I'm always telling stories about women, not younger women, and it's just a much tougher audience to get to the movie theater.

I'd like to do a romantic comedy like 'Notting Hill,' which is one of my favorite movies.

I've heard stories about movies that are really maybe difficult and really dramatic and good, but they are being sold as romantic comedies. All it's going to do is just... that's hurting the work, because that just makes it impossible for anyone to see it correctly.

Movies are romantic fantasies.

There are so many people I know who could be the greatest film-maker but who will never get the chance to make a movie; it's all about what somebody is going to make back. There are not a lot of romantic ideas about making movies anymore.

'Bonnie and Clyde,' while one of the best movies ever made, was far more interested in portraying Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker as romantic anti-establishment Robin Hoods than what they really were: white-trash spree killers.

Since so many romantic comedies vary little in their storyline, the success or failure of such movies depends largely on whether we believe in the relationship of the protagonists.

I've been in silly movies and romantic movies and historic movies.

I think there are certain tenets set in place for all different types on genres. For thrillers, women usually die first. I can't say exactly why, and it's kind of a bummer... But I also can't explain why the wallflower girl in the romantic comedy always gets the guy in the end. That's just the way those movies go.

I want to turn my attention to movies about love relationships. Exploring the female psyche - there ought to be some interesting discoveries there. Love stories. If you do it right, people want to hear romantic dialog.

I watch 'The Notebook.' I love romantic movies. I love romantic comedies.