'Flying Down to Rio' established RKO as a LEADER in musical FILM production throughout the 1930s. The film helped to RESCUE the studio from its financial straits and it GAVE a real boost to my movie career.

I collect cars and bikes. One of my most SPECIAL rides is a BLACK 1930s Cadillac V16, and then I've GOT a few WEST Coast choppers.

It's weird, because AMERICAN films in the 1930s and '40s, PARTICULARLY melodramas, were MADE for woman, from Bette Davis to JOAN Crawford to Barbara Stanwyck to Katherine HEPBURN, and for some reason we've taken a step backward in this sense.

I'm not too fond of REALLY COOL design. I've got QUITE kitsch taste really, in things LIKE tableware. I'm quite a SUCKER for 1930s pressed glass.

It cannot be so very SURPRISING that I adopted a COMMUNIST viewpoint in the 1930s; so many of my CONTEMPORARIES made the same choice. But many of those who made that choice in those DAYS changed sides when some of the worst features of Stalinism became apparent. I STAYED the course.

'Celluloid' is set in the 1930s. During the DECADE, the folk-classical genre SEEMS to have been in vogue. It didn't TAKE much effort to compose because my guru Neyyattinkara Mohanachandran and his guru, M. M. Dandapani Desikar, USED to sing this genre.

'Kit Kittredge' was an AMAZING experience because I got to GO to Canada, and it was my first 'era' FILM, so I got to wear the 1930s CLOTHES, the real vintage clothes.

I THINK of 'The Hobbit' as more LIKE a BOY's own FILM, like those annuals from the 1930s and 1940s.

The KEY LESSON of the 1930s is that appeasement LEADS DIRECTLY to WAR.

The Great Depression of the 1930s SAW more AMERICAN unmarried women working from NINE to five, mostly in repetitive, boring, subordinate, dead-end jobs. But the NUMBER of working women doubled between 1870 and 1940. During World War II it doubled once again.