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Along with its enchanting and exquisite melodies, West Side Story has attitude and a tremendous amount of frenetic energy. It's emotional, theatrical and technical. It's everything.

I'm not really a big musical fan. I enjoyed 'West Side Story' when it came out, but it gets a bit tired in the end.

Today, it's very tempting to create songs by cutting and pasting in the studio.

The funny thing is, the music that I'm writing now is probably some of the most cutting edge we've ever done. The music that I'm thinking about putting on our next album.

But at the same time, never having final cut before, I really learned an interesting thing for any studio executive who is reading this: that if a director has final cut, it's actually easier and more interesting to listen to notes.

We were concerned with having good songs, not just songs that go two hundred miles per hour.

It's like a piece of music; you never lose sight of the theme. Each scene pushes off to the next like music builds and you can almost hear the next chord progression, so it has a strict structure, which is very compelling.

I don't call cut between the takes - it's my way to help the actor keep focused. As soon as you say 'cut' you have 10 people jumping on them and everybody's trying to do a great job, and they do, but sometimes they forget that the more important thing is the performance, creating the performance.

You know, and it really doesn't have a lot to do with the movie. That's the trick to doing a good musical is that, if you take that music number out, there's less to the movie there. You would miss it.

I have mixed feelings about 'Car 54, Where Are You?' Because we shot it as a musical and whoever the studio head was at Orion, or whoever the powers that be were, cut all but, like, two musical numbers out of it. That is the same as cutting the musical numbers out of 'The Wizard Of Oz'; it wouldn't be that interesting.