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I have to say that whatever decisions I make, I really do think that movie making is a director's medium. They are the people that ultimately shape the film, and a director can take great material and turn it into garbage if they are not capable of making a good movie.

Well, I started thinking about what you were saying about how your movies need to make a profit. Now, what is the one thing, if you put it in a movie, it'll be successful?

A good project but a poor director will always make a mediocre film, but an average script and good director can make a good film, as he will put in everything to make the film look good.

If you have a script that's not great, if you have a great director, you can make a great movie, but if you have a great script with a director who's not good, never are you going to have a good movie.

Usually you talk about directors in terms of the way they choose camera lenses or a kind of light to create a certain effect. But to me the most valuable commodity for a movie to create is a feeling of life, and that's what A Hard Day's Night has in spades.

I think every director has a different take, some are good, some are bad. The directors you get on best with sometimes don't make the best films, so who's to say who is right.

You can have an amazing director and terrible script, and the film's not going to be great. But if you have the most incredible script and an okay director, you could still get a really good film.

I'm an optimist. I hope if a movie's good that it will be a success, but as we know, that's not always true, just because of popular taste, advertising, distribution patterns - there's lots of reasons.

If studios don't get their money back, we don't have any movies. So it is important that films are successful, and I am fully supportive of that because I'm not just a director, I'm also not stupid. I've been in this business long enough and, to a certain extent, I'm a businessman; I know the importance of that.

There is a director for a reason, because a director knows what's best for the movie. You just give your director as much as you can to work with, and hopefully, the decisions they make are going to be great.