James Caan told me at the end of filming 'Elf' that he had been waiting through the whole film for me to be funny - and I never was.
Now children as young as nine carry AK47s which can kill 30 people in seconds.
It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process.

