In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine.

That's what I think musicals will come to. No backstage stories, nothing of that sort.

It's the story that counts.

The Pirate is surrealism and so, in a curious way, is Father of the Bride.

I learn new things all the time.

Color can do anything that black-and-white can.

I had given up the theater and everything propelled me into entertainment. And I didn't resist it.

Cedric Gibbons was the grand cardinal of the art department.

I made three films with Douglas, two with Charles Boyer.

Fortunately, John Houseman is a marvelous writer and he sat in on so many story conferences. He worked with Welles, you know, and he's a marvelous man.

It's always the story that interests me.

If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.

But I think musicals are going to have to deal with important subjects.

But surrealism is present in most of my pictures.

Nowadays the audience has changed. No one can anticipate the audience.

In the Thirties, when I was in New York, I did the first surrealistic ballet in a show of mine.

Designing Woman was written for the screen.

No, I only like whether I like the story or not, essentially see something in it that isn't completely there.

I seem to be drawn to things that actually happen.

I use colors to bring fine points of story and character.

American films are terribly popular all over the world and American movie stars are terribly important. I don't know why.

We shot that in all the real places where Van Gogh worked.

I started out to be a painter and was born into the theater.

West Side Story was terribly important because of the style of the dancing and the gangs of New York.

I see wonderful films by Bertolucci, Visconti, and Fellini.

I've worked with an awful lot of people. Katy Hepburn, Spencer Tracy.

Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life.

I always have coffee without sugar, you know. Just cream.

I always liked the Van Gogh story because I was terribly involved in that.

I allow an area for improvisation because the chemical things actors bring to stories make it not work.

But I went down to Venezuela and spend a few weeks going through jungles. It's fantastic looking.

Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started.

I wanted to be a ballet teacher.

Classical ballet will never die.

I've got no plans to be a ballet dancer at the moment.

When life takes me on a new journey, I simply remember the smile my first ballet recital put on my face and I move forward.

Ballet is sort of a mystery to me. And I don't want to unravel that mystery.

The moment the curtain rose on that first ballet, I knew something wonderful and new had come into my life. I can still see the first scene. The ballet was Divertimento No. 15.

My grandmother had a Miss Margaret's School of Dance to teach tap and ballet to kids, but I never studied it. I was raised a Mormon and they're dancing fools. It's the only vice they have - dancing.

The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.

My background is somewhat unusual, as I trained to be a ballet dancer. I worked in the theatre for eight or nine years as a contemporary dancer. But as an actor one does read Shakespeare and does try to learn the classics.

However, the moral center of New York City, I believe, is the New York City Ballet.

I have ballet class every other day for two hours. And for "Six Feet Under", last week there was a sequence where I had to do a whole choreographed dance number, so I had four hours of dance practice every day.

I do take class because I still dance, and yes, I do slip into class with the Royal Ballet from time to time.

And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present.

It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.

For 24 hours a day, for 10 years, all I thought about was being in a band. That's all I did. I had no other social life. I don't want my life to be like that now. I've spent the past 10 years having a real life as well. But Spandau Ballet is such a difficult shadow to outrun.

When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted to be a vampire.

The New York City Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that.