Andy Garcia

When you explore a scene, the most important thing is who to cast.

I love to cook, and my wife loves to cook. Sometimes it's the appeal of the simplest of dishes - things you've grown up with in your life. Your emotional memory - something that not only affects your taste buds but that you've got an emotional attachment to.

My son loves my carbonara. I've tried to master that recipe - it's very simple but very delicate. Once prepared it must be eaten quickly.

You can't say one thing and behave another way. Kids learn more from watching you in life than what you say to them.

I think it's most important for children to understand the concept of respect and manners and also work ethic. I have a responsibility to those who came before me.

I listen to and I play all kinds of music, and I'm interested in jazz and in bluegrass - I like it all - but Cuban music speaks to me in a certain way.

The reality is that the work I do is not private work. I bring all my secrets, my life, to my work. Anybody who's seen my work knows everything about me.

I am a traditional man. I'm a product of a traditional man. He sacrificed everything for his family.

Children need parameters, know what's right or wrong.

If you have the right actors and you can give them the freedom to explore, you've done a lot of your work as a director.

I don't think lying has any ultimate justification. I don't think it ever leads to anything positive. The good fight to have is not to lie. That's one of the challenges in a way.

There's good movies and there's bad movies. The genres are never dead, it's just about how to apply them and articulate them and execute them - the story, the quality of the writing, the acting, the design elements, the directorial execution - all these things make it what it is.

You are defined by who you are, by your choices in life, in all regards, not just in doing movies.

I'm an exile. My father had the courage to leave with his wife, his mother and three children under twelve. It took more courage to leave, to sacrifice everything for freedom, than to stay.

Freedom is not negotiable.

Everybody has a dream, and everybody knows people who have a dream that they don't want to share with anybody because they're too embarrassed to share.

When you commit to something, you don't want to let your fellow people and yourself down.

It's impossible for everybody to be in sync, even the most proper family.

Every family is dysfunctional.

If you want to experiment, do something temporary.

I'm not the type of person who goes through all this effort for a movie, and then doesn't care if anybody sees it. I want them to see it, and I want them to see it on the big screen.

Becoming a producer enables you to empower yourself, to make the film that you want to make. I have desires to make movies - I have movies I'm developing, and things that I'm interested in.

Movies are very hard to make, to get it all to come together. So many people have their say in what the end product of films are.

I've had my moments of insanity. But there is a certain responsibility to set proper examples for your children, and that influences your choices in every aspect of your life.

My grandfather was a very elegant individual. My father also. He was a lawyer and farmer in Cuba. In Miami, he had to go to work wherever he could. But whenever it was time to go out, you saw how they cared for how they looked.