For me Crash is one of the most upfront treatments of racism in an American metropolis since Do the Right Thing. Did that make it difficult to finance?
Oh, it was terrible. No one wanted to do it. First of all, I was an unknown director. I had directed for television but that's actually worse. It would have been better if I had been a complete unknown. Also, it's very hard to tell the tone of the movie from the script, because it could have come off as really preachy, or rather the characters preaching and being didactic, and the film could come off that way, which I didn't want to do. I wanted to lampoon these characters who were saying these great, wonderful things. So we took it out of the studios, where no one wanted it, and we took it to quite a few financiers. And they liked the script but didn't want to do it with me as the director. Finally, we found Bob Yari and Cathy Schulman, and they said, “Yeah, we'll put up a little bit of money, to get it cast.” So it took us a year and a half to get the right cast that worked for them so they'd put more of the money up. All the actors worked for nothing. We all waived our fees.