It's about greedy corporations that are willing to blow up all of Paris - art, nature, everything - to get at the oil underneath the city. With Enron, Alaskan oil and other things today, I think greed like that is more on people's minds now.

Fifteen or 18 years ago, I brought up directing this at UNM and everyone thought it was too old-fashioned. Now, it's come back into its own.

You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.

Nature and art: The material and the workmanship. There is no beauty unaided, no excellence that does not sink to the barbarous, unless saved by art: It redeems the bad and perfects the good. Because nature commonly forsakes us at her best, take refuge in art. The best in nature is raw without art, and the excellent is lacking if it lacks culture. Without cultivation everyone is a clown and needs polish, fine attributes notwithstanding.

Art is man's nature; nature is God's art

The counterfeit and counterpart of nature are reproduced in art.