Elia Kazan claimed I once told him, “Here I am, a balding middle-aged failure, and I feel like a fraud when I act. I’ve tried everything—fucking, drinking, work—and none of it means anything.” I don’t remember saying that, but I may have. With so much prejudice, racial discrimination, injustice, hatred, poverty, starvation and suffering in the world, making movies seemed increasingly silly and irrelevant, and I felt I had to do what I could to make things better. I spent these years of my life in a philosophical quandary, thinking, If I am not my brother’s keeper, who am I? Where are the lines between that which is mine, and that which is Caesar’s? Where does my life end and my responsibility to others begin? For a long time I was driven to involve myself in a war against what I perceived as social injustice and political hypocrisy. As I’ve grown older, I am less sure of many of the things I felt then, but it was another time. For most of my life, a black-and-white world was attractive and convenient for me; it was easier to take sides.
