RY: I call myself Rob--it's Robert M. Young. I use the M on credits for identification 'cause there are a whole bunch of Robert Youngs, and people call me Bob or Robert, but Bob--[INT: And where were you born?] I was born in the Bronx, in New York City. I was born November 22nd, 1924. So I'm 80 years old. [INT: Fabulous.]

INT: And do you remember the first movie you ever saw? Or is there a movie that somehow sticks with you?

RY: Yes, I have images of--I remember the first image I have of a movie that I saw was of actually a gorilla escaping from a cage and I remember my cousin ran out of the theater and I ran out after him. That's the, my first image but--[INT: How old were you?] I don't know. I must have been six or seven or something like that.

INT: Was there a movie that ever made, early on, made an impression?

RY: You know, there is a movie that made a tremendous impression on me and I didn't realize it until much later. I have actually been someone who… Well my father was a film Editor, so I grew up in an atmosphere of film. When I was born, my father had started DuArt [DuArt Film and Video] film laboratory, so he really was not really doing so much editing, but he still did some and I--so I grew up knowing about film and about movies and my father was, I think, a remarkable guy. But anyway, I was not… I wanted to get to be a filmmaker at some point very early on. But I never thought of it as a profession. Sort of odd, maybe, because it's what I guess I am. But I was much--my life was much more about trying to pursue things that I was really interested in and have adventures that I really wanted to have. This connects with the movie and I'll tell you how. So I'm not a student of movies. I'm kind of ashamed to say it. I rarely in my life have seen a movie more than once. I think it has something to do with being afraid that I would be derivative. And that I would be choosing my--everything from film, when actually, the thing that attracted me and interested me was that I wanted to be in life, I wanted to be having adventures, I wanted to be living in the world, and I wanted to be making my films about the things that I learned in the world and the rhythms of the world would sort of--that was the idealistic kind of thought that I had. Anyway, this last fall, I was invited to Rochester [Rochester, New York], to the museum there, the cinema museum [George Eastman House International Museum of Photography & Film]. Really terrifically nice people at Eastman Kodak Rochester theatre [Eastman Theatre]. And they invited me. They wanted to show my film ALAMBRISTA! and they invited me for a four-day weekend 'cause they wanted to talk to me and, you know, and they said I could screen anything I wanted. Well, I didn't want to put them out and so I said, "Well, you know, whatever you're running." And they said, "No, no, you have to pick one film that you really would love to see." So I just said, “KING KONG.” And so there was a screening of a beautiful print of KING KONG. I had only seen it once when I was a little kid. And it turned out, I was eight years old when I saw KING KONG, because they knew when it had opened. And I sat in the theater and it's amazing, I remembered almost all of it. And I think that I have been--and at the end of the screening there were, you know, about half a dozen people were there and they turned to me and they wanted to see what my reaction was and I was just stunned. And I said, "Here I thought I'm somebody who's trying-- I mean I love movies, I like to go to movies, but I'm ashamed to say I've never studied them 'cause I've been afraid of being too influenced and becoming, you know, copying things. But now, I realize that this film KING KONG has influenced my entire life and actually has affected me in a very deep way and my filmmaking, too.” I was flabbergasted and--at that.

INT: What things came up?

RY: Well, for example, well--of course, KING KONG is a--there's a deep moral in KING KONG. It's a mythological underpinning about the beast and the beautiful woman and he falls in love, and I've always felt that--I'm always trying to find a mythology in my films. So that's one thing. And even right at the very beginning of the film, there was some kind of little aphorism that Cooper had written; something about the beast and I had forgotten that, of course, but remembered it as I watched the film and I think that I was just deeply influenced by that. And it's true that a tremendous amount of my life has been spent running off into kind of romantic faraway places in search of--like trying to rescue the beautiful girl in the jungle. I mean I've been--I've spent almost over a year and a half in Africa, I've been in the jungles of, you know, up the Orinoco [Orinoco River] in South America. I've been in Borneo following, you know, a big orangutan, which was very close to the KING KONG kind of thing. I've spent a year and a half in New Guinea. I've spent a lot of time with tribal people. I spent a lot of time in jungles and places like that. [INT: Wow.] And I've been absolutely fascinated by them and two of my screenplays that I hope to get made still deal with people in those kind of exotic circumstances.

INT: Having been exposed to this business, why did you want to become a Director? And why didn't your dad say, "Don't do it?"

RY: My dad did say, "Don't do it," because I was a very unrealistic, idealistic kid. And, I think, my father thought that I wouldn't be tough enough and I think he was right in many ways. I'm not confrontational. He thought people would walk all over me and he wanted me to be in the film lab where he had made a success out of it and therefore I'd be protected and I could earn a salary every week and I would inherit the business and I just was not about to do that. I--so, well, I mean I went to college. I was 15 when I got out of high school. [INT: So you were very smart.] Well, I don't know that I was so smart. We traveled a little bit and so I had to take exams and I got ahead of myself. And I waited a year and I went to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] when I was 16. And--[INT: This was for--were you a science major?] Pardon me? [INT: As a science major? Were you?] I was--yeah, my dad pushed me into chemical engineering, because that would have been great for the lab and he wanted me to go in the lab. And I didn't really care for it. I loved science, I was very good at math, and I, but I was almost flunking out. I mean, I was 16, I was--my glands were raging, I had, I mean I just couldn't pay attention. And then the war came and I--fortunately, I mean, a terrible thing, the war, but for me it was an escape from MIT and from my parents. And I went into the Navy and I was… I lied to get in the Navy. My eyesight wasn't that good and I red-green colorblind. And I… But I learned the color charts, thinking that that was something that you really could do at that time. And I had contact lenses made so I could cheat on the eye chart. So I got into the Navy and--but, because I had almost two years at MIT, a year and a half and a summer term, I think I got like a perfect score. So I got chosen for Annapolis [United States Naval Academy] and it scared the hell out of me because, I mean, I wanted to be in the fleet, I wanted to get out--I wanted to be in the war. The last thing I wanted was to be in Annapolis and then be discovered that I had lied and my eyesight wasn't proper. Anyway, so I was asked to--I said, "No, I'm not going." But I was given the choice of any school, and so I chose photo school and I went to Pensacola [Pensacola, Florida] and I was being trained as an aerial photographer and as a photographer's mate and a gunner in--so anyway, so I went to the Pacific, I was in for two years and in New Guinea for a year and then a year in the Philippines and it was fantastic for me. It opened my eyes to other parts of the world. I became very close to some of the indigenous people, both in New Guinea and in the Philippines. I had a Philippine girlfriend, very innocent relationship, but anyway, I've always been attracted to the other. [INT: Right.] And--

INT: What made you, then, out of this, though, still choose this world? I mean, directing, specifically. Why choose that?

RY: Why directing, then? [INT: Yeah, why did you choose directing?] Well, I love storytelling. And I thought, really, from the time I was very young that storytelling was a very important thing that... And I had experiences that enforced that. I remember--now, this is not, I'm not as young, then, but in my thirties, I remember being in an igloo with an old Eskimo [Inuit] who was in his 80s and he was chanting his family song, which was, his own clan could claim this song and only the clan could sing it. But it was the history of the people and the, like in THE ILIAD, you know, Priam's father, so-and-so's so-and-so's son and so on. I mean in pre-literate societies, that's how they would remember the ancestors and their own histories, with this oral tradition. And I was filming this guy, his name was Kroppan Gyak, and he was a beautiful man. He was rocking back and forth, singing his song, and there was a woman, his family member. Young woman, about 20, 19 or 20, with a baby that was not more than a year old. And the little baby started, was babbling, and chanted the same thing that the old man was chanting. [Young starts singing] And the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I realized that I was watching, like, something really fundamental in human history, like Homer. That history, that who we are, is even taken in before we even understand the meaning of words. And that these great song cycles and histories of people were learned from before, you know, like kids took in their mother's milk. And so... And these stories told who people were is tremendously important, you know. Much later in life, when I read Oliver Sacks and he studies people who've had brain damage and lost their memory and they become really, like, they're still human but they, you know, without any history, without the story of who you are, you really are nothing.

RY: I mean I feel like I've wasted a tremendous amount of my life, you know, indolence. But I have, I spent six years making films about life in the sea, and I have lived with Eskimos [Inuit] in the Arctic for part of a winter in an igloo with the most traditional left in the world. And I've traveled with tribes in Africa and New Guinea. I've traveled with desert nomads. I've been in--and I've always been interested in other cultures and I think it has something to do with the fact that my own family, my father's parents were Russian Jews and my grandfather was an atheist and didn't care very much for religion, but that was his cultural background, religious heritage. And he had 10 kids and an 11th, an orphan, who was Catholic, who he raised as a Catholic. And so, I was introduced to very, I was in a very open kind of family. Really non-preju--lack of prejudice, I would say, and very open. And but still, I was very aware of my heritage, of my Jewishness and later in life, Martin Buber became a very important philosopher to me, who says, "You stand in your father's doorway so you could talk with people who walked by and walk with them in the street. But you know who you are." And I think when I was very young; I had a lot of problems wanting to deny my background, my Jewishness. I wanted to be part of the more inclusive society and the bigger society. And later, I changed my mind and I feel privileged. That's maybe the wrong word. It sounds like, special. But lucky, maybe, is better, to be an outsider because I think that way, I think you're more able to see things that people take for granted [INT: Its interesting, isn't it?]. And so very early I was very attracted to anybody who was slighted or, I mean I was… My first writing was really about a black man and that was long before NOTHING BUT A MAN. And so, I've had a--I've been attracted to the other. I've been--so that's why I've gone to New Guinea and I've been with tribal people and that has a lot to do with why I chose to make a film in the South. First I made a film called SIT-IN and--which lead to my going to Africa and--

INT: Let me back up just a little bit. [RY: Sure.] It's interesting. The Buber [Martin Buber] thing makes me think if there's a Buber line I like a lot, which is, "All life is meeting," which is one of Martin Buber's lines. Were there mentors? Before we sort of get into the films that you started to make, or possibly in the process, were there mentors for you? Either people that you actually met, or people whose work you saw and said, "This is something that I can learn from."

RY: Well, you know, well being--I was raised in Long Island and so I was very far from Hollywood. And, but of course, as I said, my dad had been an Editor. But there was no formal kind of thought about filmmaking. I mean I'd go to the movies like all the other kids did, and but the things that first began to really influence me were certain documentaries that I did see. I used to belong to Cinema 16 [film society] and I would go to see the foreign films. And although I enjoyed American films very much, I thought they were not realistic enough, a lot of them. And so, I got to know Grierson, John Grierson, a documentary filmmaker who was a friend of my dad's. And so I took a special interest in those kind of films because they were reality-based. And, of course, you know, it's sort of strange. My first job was actually… I got my first job from Adolph Zukor. He offered me a cigar. I'll never forget it. I was 15 years old and he was interviewing me to, for he needed someone to film his estate in Nanuet [Nanuet, New York]. And through a contact, somebody said that I was a good Cameraman. And I did. I took lots of pictures and I was 15 and I got 75 dollars. And I'll never forget. So that, that really is going back. Adolph Zukor was the president of Paramount [Paramount Pictures] at that point. And later in my life, I did have a mentor in Merian C. Cooper. And it's amazing. I didn't--I told you before that I saw KING KONG and I--and it just overwhelmed me and I realized, when I saw it, how important an emotional and aesthetic experience that film had been for me. It was just very powerful. But later, when I was in my 30s, I wrote a script. After I had been working on films about life in the sea, I wrote a script with another guy called CHILDREN OF THE SEA and it was about a boy and a porpoise and this was long before FLIPPER or any of those movies had been made. And I had been awarded like $350,000 from Marine Studios in Florida and C.V. Whitney [Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney] was the head of the board of Marine Studios and he--they loved the script that I had written and I had made a film with two colleagues called SECRETS OF THE REEF, which was on the best 10 list, one of the 10 best films of the year, even though it was a documentary. And that was in 1957. But he gave my script to Merian C. Cooper, because at that time, Whitney was an Executive Producer of THE SEARCHERS with John Ford, and Merian Cooper was producing it and John Wayne was in it and so he gave the script to Cooper and Cooper said, "I gotta do this. This is the next best thing to KING KONG." So I was invited to go to Douglas Burden [W. Douglas Burden], a very--member of the board, very wealthy, prominent person. Had a house on Lake Champlain and that's where I met Merian Cooper. And he wanted to make this film. Of course, he wanted to direct it with Ernest--with Winnie Hoch [Winton C. Hoch], who was shooting, I think had been shooting THE SEARCHERS and won, like, three Academy Awards. And they wanted me to become the DP [Director of Photography], the Cinematographer. Well, I was thrilled. I had no jealousy or resentment about it; he wanted to do this film. I just loved Cooper. He was an extraordinary guy.

INT: And what kind of guy was he [Merian C. Cooper]?

RY: He was fantastic. He always wore a baseball cap and he was down to earth and he was a southern gentleman. He was soft-spoken, but he was--I just found him fantastic. He was tough, too. I mean, he had a--he gave me a notebook, he said, "You have to fill this journal everyday," and he put a sign in front of me which said, "Waste not five minutes” because it was, you know, it may mean the difference between victory and defeat. It was some quote from Horatio Hornblower, or Wellington. I can't remember it now, but I wish I still had it because it had his signature and it was "To: Bob." But anyway, he was an extraordinary man and he'd made CHANG [CHANG: THE DRAMA OF THE WILDERNESS] and GRASS [GRASS: A NATION’S BATTLE FOR LIFE], two early documentaries that were great, as well as making KING KONG and producing a lot of the great John Ford movies. But he wanted to make this movie and he had me come to California. The first time I'd ever been to California. And I came and stayed here and Winnie Hoch [Winton C. Hoch] was designing 70 millimeter cameras, two of them. And they wanted to use them and 80 DAYS AROUND THE WORLD [AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS] had just come out and we were gonna make this film, CHILDREN OF THE SEA and roadshow it. And I went to the Bahamas with Cooper and he kind of adopted me. And somebody had gone off to make GRASS and failed. And I hope it's not inappropriate to say things that somebody who's no longer living, he can't corroborate what I say, but he said he would have sent me and I would not have come back without accomplishing the mission. I mean, anyway, he was like a father to me and he--we went to the Bahamas for, I don't even remember how long, a month or so. Looking for locations, and he was just tremendous to me. I, and he was very daring. We were trying to, I was trying to figure out how to film big, pelagic fish. The pelagic fish are the fish that never stop swimming, like big marlin and sailfish. And I actually caught a big Pacific Sailfish off La Paz and off Baja and swam with it for over a half an hour and injected it with sodium amytal and then released it. And I did a lot of interesting things in the sea. And Cooper loved all of that. I flew to Guadalupe Islands to be with the big elephant seals and... He was just like a father--[INT: What were some--]--he encouraged me and--

INT: What were some of the advice that you might--besides the one about time, anything else stick in your mind or you recall?

RY: From Cooper [Merian C. Cooper]? [INT: From Cooper.] Well, he told me a lot about his own personal history. And I remember a lot of those stories: he'd been shot down in World War I and then later was shot down, he fought for the--against the--in the '20s [1920s] he fought with the Poles against the Russians and was a captive in the Kremlin and escaped and made his way to Poland as a deaf mute. And I, as I said, I love adventure. I love the idea of going off someplace, even alone. And having to rely on other people and trying to figure things out. I've actually done that a fair amount in my life. And it kind of can be very stupid, too.

INT: When you think about qualities as you look at yourself over the years, if you were talking to a new filmmaker and they were asking, "What are the qualities that I need to have to be a good Director?" What are some of the things that you would say?

RY: Well, I would say the ability to listen is a tremendously important thing. And by listening, I think it means intuiting, like qualities that people have, so that you can get a sense of who they really are and then be able to draw those things out. I mean that's something that's been tremendously important to me and I love acting. I later studied with Strasberg [Lee Strasberg] to be an Actor, because I wanted to learn the professional language. And I wanted to be an Actor, because I thought it was tremendously important for Directors to really understand the process of acting and be able to talk with Actors, so you could help them. And I think I'm very intuitive in that I get along with Actors. I love Actors. And so I'd say listening is a tremendously important kind of thing. And then, I guess daydreaming, you know? I'm a daydreamer. I allow my imagination to take me into imaginary situations and things come alive. I dream a lot of the scenes that I shoot. I wake up. Maybe it's not I'm in a deep sleep, but I'm in some kind of a trance-like state. And I see a lot of scenes that way, how to shoot them. They just film--I just see them in front of my eyes. But another thing I think that's tremendously... Well there are so many things that are important. One is developing a sense of structure. So I think that studying literature--I'm sure studying other films, which I don't do. But I'm sure that's important, and I would be better if I had done that. But trying to have some kind of a classical kind of a background. After--I mean, I'm not a very well-educated person, I think, in a way. But I went to--I studied English literature at Harvard [Harvard University] after I got out of the service and I, I mean I love, you know, good writing and I love storytelling. I mean that was what--and I think that the... I don't know that there are any rules, but certainly, I do very strongly believe in structure, that you can't talk about things. Structure is actually the locus for ideas. It's one thing to talk about ideas but if something happens in structure, if there are two brothers and one is a good brother, one is a bad brother, you know, already there's a locus for certain kinds of ideas. So, and things have to--ideas have to gravitate into the center of a story for them to become meaningful, palpable.

RY: So my first, my interest in documentaries in the real world was that, then forced me to start thinking about, well how do you tell stories about, like, what seems random? I mean, you go in the sea, it's all random. You don't even understand things until you start identifying things and then they start becoming real to you. So it's like characters. And then you--but then, how do you tell about it? Well, you either learn about it and then tell about it, which is certainly one way, and they're beautiful films, particularly in documentaries that are made that are beautiful essays. But that isn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to impose my view, even though I know that it's impossible to escape one's own view. But what I was interested in, in filmmaking, and the thing that very much attracted me to what I want--I mean, was the focus of what I want to do, was to tell stories that really revealed themselves, that came out of life and that were not imposed by me, but I would begin to understand and the story would start to unfold and start telling itself. And I wondered, well how the heck do you do that? I mean I'd be with groups of people and I wondered what was the story? And then I began to feel that, like I was at a party and the next morning, I would realize that I had--all I remembered of the party was certain situations. The way a guy looked at a certain girl, and then I began to see certain things. And I began to feel that situation was what I was really looking for in my trying to tell any kind of stories. And I would be, like, I'd interview somebody and try to find out about something and then I talked to somebody else and discuss the same event and it would be very different. And I found--but with situation, I could relate the people who had the different points of view and the situation could accommodate that. They could each be different, they could each have their own point of view, but the situation positioned you. So I mean I remember thinking, like, well, like, if I saw a guy flirting with a woman and then another woman came in the room and said, "Honey, it's time to pick up the kids." Okay, all of a sudden, clearly, there's a situation. And right away, in my mind, in the audience's mind, it's--there's lots of questions. There's this woman, did she know he was married? Did the wife catch him? Did--is he indifferent? I mean there are a hundred bunch of questions that come up and that made me aware of the fact that then the audience gets pulled into the kind of negative space, and then you start trying to--and then you're caught up in the drama of--and then the slightest little behavior tells you things and the thing that I've grown up not wanting to do was to have Actors indicate. I don't like, I mean, it's very bad acting. It's people going to the result, people telling you who they are. People trying to... It just ruins the story. The stories lose their power when you know, really, where they're going. They get even more exciting when you think you know where they're going and they don't go there. Or maybe, ultimately, they do go there, but then they get there in a way you never imagined. But my own aesthetic was very much... And it came out of my documentaries. It came out of watching the life of a snail on the bottom of the sea or, and the different adventures that it has. Or...

INT: Looking at that issue, let's examine your relationship to scripts, specifically, because you now, we're at two filmmaking worlds. You have the documentary filmmaking world, and you have the narrative filmmaking world. And I know that your work really is a blending of those worlds, at least the narrative were, oftentimes. [RY: Yeah.] So I'm curious, let's talk about your relationship, 'cause a lot of the stuff you originated, but there's stuff other people you've worked with, as Writers. What's that process for you? What, first of all, what--let's look at the documentary first. How do you get turned on to wanting to do a documentary in the first place? Not documentaries, but why this one? What is it that grabs you that you say, "I'm not gonna pursue this."

RY: Well, oh boy, there are lots of things. Well, my favorite film of all the films I've made, I think, is a film called CORTILE CASCINO. It's less than an hour long and it was a--it's about the life of very, very poor people in Palermo, Sicily, in a slum called Cortile Cascino. And I actually went for NBC. I was gonna make an NBC WHITE PAPER about life in this slum and three days before the air date they canceled it. They said it was too powerful for American television and they destroyed the film, but somebody, knowing it was gonna be destroyed, sneaked in the vault, made copies of the original, put the original back and so I eventually got the film, three, four years later. And I have it. It really says--that film really captures a lot of what I am about in a way. First of all, I was attracted to this place because of the people, the humanness, the vivid qualities of these people. And the fact that they were living in dramatic circumstances. One in five children died before they were five years old. [INT: Now how did you know about them in the first place?] I read a book called INCHIESTA A PALERMO, REPORT FROM PALERMO, written by a man named Danilo Dolci. A brilliant, fantastic man who had a great influence on me. I mean, I hardly knew him. But I mean, I read all his books and... [INT: Is this a sociologist, or?] No, this is a poet. This is a guy, Danilo Dolci is a Sicilian. He's no longer alive now, unfortunately. He studied architecture and decided he wasn't gonna build conventional architecture 'cause he didn't want to build the same relationships into structures that existed. He felt there needed to be new relationships. And he, when he was still a young man he worked in a, for a priest. He was not religious, formally, but he worked in a place where there were orphans who were run by a priest, a Catholic priest, and then he left that and started--went to Sicily to a place called Trappeto in a very run-down town in Western Sicily, where 60% of the men were unemployed and a lot of orphans, their fathers were in jail, and he was an extraordinary man and he wrote about these things and he won many awards for his writing. He also won the Lenin Peace Prize, which he accepted non-politically. And he wanted to bring about change in Sicily, but he wanted to protect the values of the people. But, I mean, I learned things from him, too, when I talk about structure, for example, in Sicily, boys and girls went to school separately. So he formed a doposcuola, an after-school program where boys and girls went to school together. That's a good example of a structural change and it's only in structure that things really happen. I mean, I'm saying something that I believe deeply in terms of my own filmmaking, my own writing, and my own working on scripts. That it's not--I mean somebody says about something, it's nothing. But when you form a doposcuola, and then boys and girls are interacting, that's a structural change. And that brings about change. And that's--I mean, I think that's applicable to scripts as well as to just, I mean, scripts come out of life, too, so. Anyway, I was, as I said, I've been attracted to the other. I've been attracted to the marginal people.

INT: You'd read this book ["Report From Palermo"]?

RY: I read this book and I talked NBC into letting me go--[INT: Let me back off just a bit 'cause you'd already made a number of films, documentaries.] This was in 1960. [INT: Oh, so this is later on in sort of your filmmaking work, yes? I mean, this is not the first--] Well, I had made a number of documentaries and I was learning, but this was the first time in that film [CORTILE CASCINO], I think, I achieved what I was trying to do. [INT: Got it.] And it became--it inhabits all of my films.

INT: And what's the specific that you're saying, particularly if you're looking at the structure and the writing of that [CORTILE CASCINO], or the evolution of that? Why does that one stand out for you?

RY: Well, it stands out for me because, one, I think that it's deeply true. But one of my criteria always is psychological truth. I'm not concerned about the literal truth in the sense that film is a construct, so it's impossible to… I mean, we're not just reproducing the world, and you also see it form a certain point of view and you enter at a certain point of view and it's a construct, so we don't have to go over all of that. Everybody knows that. But anyway, but psychological truth is something that I can't… I mean I'm not saying I'm always accurate, or live up to it, but that's my goal. And I can't do a scene if I don't think that it's psychologically true. So I've turned down many films, because I've said… Raffaella De Laurentiis just offered me a film not too long, you know, just two years ago. And I saw the pre--it was a sequel and I saw the one she did before and I said, "I think you don't want me. I think I'm gonna just cause so much trouble 'cause if that's what you wanted, I mean I wouldn't have let a lot of those scenes go, because I don't think they're psychologically true and they're covered with verve or," and she laughed and she said, "Well, we'll do something else together."

INT: And in terms of what you--this is a tougher question. Defining psychological truth. Are you saying, you're saying the human behavior is honest on a deep level, not only on a conscious level but also on a subconscious, unconscious?

RY: Well, I think somebody could be lying, for example. And I could catch that and the psychological truth would be that the person is lying. But, I mean, I think that there's a--well, I believe that from the time you're born, you learn to read reality. And you know whether your mother feels good about you, or bad about you. Whether she's gonna, you know, I mean, I think we learn this so deeply that it's engrained in us. And those instincts are instincts that I think, as we grow up, we often betray. Or we don't want to know the truth about someone or we deal with things in a much more surface level. And this is what I believe. And, I mean, I see films like when, in A STAR IS BORN, when Kristofferson [Kris Kristofferson] falls in love with... [INT: Streisand [Barbra Streisand].] Yeah. It's because she's the star of the movie. And I can't--that doesn't work for me. Yeah, I can go along with it and maybe I'll enjoy it, but it abuses my sensibilities.