I have a farm in Maryland with 18 horses - 12 Clydesdales and the rest palominos. I also have eight big cats - two lions, two tigers, two leopards, a bobcat and a three-legged mountain lion."

I had a great crew, a wonderful director of photography in Jack Green, who had done a lot of Clint Eastwood`s films, so he`s a great third eye.

I used to be a hardcore, hardhearted guy. Once you make the decision to change, all kinds of things happen.

This directing thing just sort of fell my way and landed in my lap.

I`ve know Halle a long time, I knew Halle when she first started and I`ve watched her grow, and she`s turned into a real pro now.

When I was out there on stage and the guys were laughing, I could see I had them in the palm of my hand. I thought, "I just discovered what I was born to do." It was an enormous kind of power.

In a few years, I ended up going from jail to Yale.

You`re 5 feet nothing, a hundred and nothing.

And like everybody else, I like the Rocky movies, but if you look at them again you can see all the misses, but the intensity of it, but that wasn`t what this is.

I still make more money as I do as an actor than director, however I don`t want to be a commercial director.

Acting is the easiest money you`ll ever make in your life, and directing is probably the hardest money.

I`m trying my hand at writing. I`m writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries.

The thing is, the studio then forget that you`re an actor and that you can do other things, and so since they pay you for that, they don`t want you to do anything else.

What I learned as an actor was the only way you could really do August Wilson`s work, you had to leave an ounce of your essence on that stage,... Otherwise it was impossible.

First of all, you look at Rocky films now, and if that isn`t a cartoon series there isn`t any cartoon series. I mean there`s no way anybody is going to take that amount of punishment in fifteen rounds.

I didn`t go to film school, I went to acting school.

Because I killed a guy in real life, and because my character kills a guy onstage, they said I could never do anything this great again. I resented that.

I don`t even know if I can call myself a director.

Juan Hernandez was an actor out of New York, but what made Juan so great and what made Omar so great was that they both already knew how to box, so we didn`t have to take them into a gym and teach them how to throw a left jab.

For me, I have to love it and feel something for it because you`re going to be stuck with it for two years, and if you don`t love it it`s going to look like that on screen.

I just don`t want to do a movie because it paid me a lot of money.