[Late Show Interview] One reason actors don't strike well is, actors don't like other actors.

It takes too long for a project to wend its way from development to release these days.Not long ago, it was possible to make a deal for a project and steer it into production within a year. Al Ruddy and I once pushed a movie from one-liner to start date within four months! It was called Plein la gueule (1974) and it made a lot of money... The business used to have a bit more spontaneity.

You know, making Le parrain (1972) was such an extraordinarily unpleasant experience in every aspect that I've avoided thinking about it or talking about it for 30 years. It's one of those things where you say to yourself, "This could not have happened". Everybody turned on everyone else. The president of the company was fired during it. And one of the things I've found I repressed in recent years was, I woke up one morning and I thought, as an ex-journalist, I am not a naive person, you are not a naive person, but I realized that there really was a plot afoot during the third week of shooting Le parrain (1972) to fire Francis Ford Coppola.

I despair at what's happening as an effect of the whole celebrity culture and the way the media covers it because, for one thing, it's changing the nature of movie stars and what they are and how they live. Stars are like hunted animals today. They really feel afraid to emerge from their compounds with their posses and go to clubs or restaurants and try to live like normal people live. They do feel that they, to a large degree, have to hide because wherever they go, paparazzi [are] hanging outside their home. The Hollywood that I first came to, throughout the '70s and '80s, you walk down the street in Beverly Hills, Fred Astaire, [James Stewart, all these old stars would be ambling by. You go into a restaurant, it was no big deal about being a legend. I would eat lunch every day next to John Wayne, who would grouchily eat his steak and drink his beer and talk about what idiots the Democrats are.