But it's much more exciting to make Die Hard. One of the reasons that I think that movie is so successful is it deals with those very important blue-collar relationship themes. But it's more visually beautiful to show things blowing up. It just gives you more on the screen.

I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like.

It's useless to try and make rhyme or reason of it because one guy thinks one thing and the other guy sees a whole other thing. So I try not to take them too seriously. Lately I have them screened so I only read the positive ones.

Acting is fun and I refuse to get involved in the semantics and the politics of strategy and breaking out of something or doing something because you need to do something else. For me it's all about what fuels my soul and if I'm passionate about a screenplay then that's what I'll do next.

My films are an extension of my poetry using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

Because I'm the author of my screenplays I know what I'm looking for. It's true that I can be stubborn in demanding that I get what I want but it's also a question of working with patience and love.

I've rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.

I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

I grew up in L.A. and I don't think I've seen L.A. onscreen in a way that felt real to me. There are definitely movies but they are few and far between.

I was going to make movies. I was the one in the family who was always rolling the video camera making movies of my brothers around town and then screening them for my parents. I still would love to make movies someday... that's something that really means a lot to me and I know I'll have the chance to do it one day.

In terms of number of movies I've been in an extraordinary amount. If you count only the minutes I'm onscreen it's not so long.

Frank is such a great visual storyteller that if you study his artwork you see that his Sin City books are already the best movies never seen on the big screen.

I don't watch the movies I make so I haven't seen 'Footloose' since it came out. You see this young hungry actor it's pretty fun. I was the only one they screen tested. It was an attempt by the director and producer to talk the head of the studio into hiring me because they didn't want me.

With the CGI suddenly there's a thousand enemies instead of six - the army goes off into the horizon. You don't need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That's something that's consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that's a soulless enterprise. It's all kinetics without emotion.

Actors are steeped in a world of agents and where the next job is coming from and what are their expenses and what is the hotel like. You want to take them out of that world and dump them into another world so that when you meet them on the screen they don't seem like the guy who was in two others movies that year.

The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago and they're all driven by the possibilities of CGI which means you can make anything happen on screen that you can possibly desire.

There are only so many movies you can direct. And yet there are movies that I want to make sure make it to the screen in as honest a way as possible.