Acclaimed Canadian filmmaker and national treasure Norman Jewison talks about his love/hate relationship with Hollywood in his autobiography, This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me.

"Show business is a tough gig. I don't know. It's full of all kinds of disappointments and, you know, it's not all applause and make-up. It's a tough business," Jewison told Canada AM's Seamus O'Regan.

The prolific director, who has garnered multiple Academy Awards for movies such as In the Heat of the Night in 1967 and Moonstruck in 1987, has also been awarded with Canada's highest civilian honour, Companion to the Order of Canada, in 1992.

With more than 30 films to his credit, Jewison has worked for some of Hollywood's biggest studios and with many A-list celebrities -- a reality that, he feels, has its disadvantages.

"Yeah, I think star power, the whole cult of celebrity has been fanned by all these magazines," the Toronto-born filmmaker told Canada AM.

"People magazine, US magazine, there are 15 different magazines with the same picture on the cover, Lonnie Anderson in a tight T-shirt or something, I don't know. It's just this kind of baseness, it's kind of shallow, I think."

"Celebrity worship and the stars became very important. But the stars were always important, I think. The directors, the filmmakers used to be important in the '60s, '70s, maybe into the '80s, and then it was really the studios. The studios were bought out by multinationals so we all ended up working for big corporations."

As for the current state of the movie industry, Jewison has an optimistic outlook.

"I haven't given up on it. I think, as a matter of fact, the good films are getting better. It's just that they're smaller, they're independents."

"If you've noticed, of all the Academy nominations last year, four out of the five were independent films. They weren't studio films, they weren't big Hollywood blockbusters because a Hollywood blockbuster is essentially a dumb picture."

Following is an excerpt from This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me:

Chapter 16 - On Love and Other Human Follies

Loretta: You and I are going to take this to our graves.
Ronnie: I can't do that.
Loretta: Why not?
Ronnie: I'm in love with you.
Loretta (slaps him hard, pauses, slaps him again): Snap out of it!
-Moonstruck

My love stories have always been a bit zany and never entirely serious. It isn't that I don't think love can be serious, sometimes catastrophic, sometimes merely heartbreaking, usually intense and complicated, but I just see it as one of the ultimate human follies, less dangerous than rage, less harmful than hate, and a whole lot less likely to lead to general mayhem than envy. I have tended to show humanity as fallible, sensitive, befuddled, misled, but redeemable rather than mindlessly, relentlessly violent. I want people to recognize themselves in the movies I make. I don't enjoy no-brainer action movies. And I do not imagine those movies are for my audience. The audiences I have in mind when I make films are adults who know about love and sex. They have known betrayal and abandonment. They have been tempted and, sometimes, succumbed. They are neither perfect nor evil. They have jobs, families, mortgages, they do not dress in full leather and carry massive weapons on their hips, they are not action heroes. But when attacked, they defend themselves and will try to do the right thing.When they die, they usually stay dead.

The Thomas Crown Affair was a film about love as a game, style over content. Only You was about love as destiny, about a young woman's search for her perfect soul mate. Dinner with Friends was about marriage, divorce, and the fine lines in between. In Country is about family. Moonstruck was the ultimate romantic love story, irrational, compelling, physical, operatic. It's also about family.

It was originally called The Bride and the Wolf-hard to imagine a worse title for a romantic film. My friend the literary agent Jeannine Edmunds gave me the script, so I read it. Jeannine represented a number of young New York playwrights, including John Pielmeier and John Patrick Shanley. She had a great eye for wit, for credible dialogue, for talent. But The Bride and the Wolf was the kind of script that makes you suspect you haven't been offered a unique favor. In addition to having one of the worst titles I have ever seen on any cover, it was dog-eared, coffee-stained, well-thumbed. It was also excessively talky.

"Who's read this?" I asked Jeannine.

"Everybody," she said with characteristic frankness. "But that was before Five Corners. And he wrote this on spec, Norman. No one has actually made an offer." She told me the script had been written for Sally Field. She had seen the playwright's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea on stage and asked if he would write a film for her. He agreed to write it, but refused to accept payment until she read it and liked it. In the end, though she loved it, she couldn't get the financing.

I read it that night. There was something about the script that grabbed me and wouldn't let go. There was something grand, operatic, and terribly human about the story and the way the characters behaved. At that point, I had only a germ of an idea about how it might translate into a movie, but I did want to meet the author.

John Patrick Shanley arrived for our meeting very casually, a few minutes late, decked out like a student turning up for an afternoon tutorial. He was in his mid-thirties, tall, handsome, long-haired, shabby, wrinkled corduroy pants, trench coat, a look of casual disdain. A young New Yorker, not about to be impressed by a Hollywood director.

"So," he said in a broad Bronx accent, "what pictures have you done?" He sat on the arm of a chair, sipping his instant coffee with obvious distaste. He was tense, as if ready to leave at any moment.

"A few," I said. I knew I was being auditioned. "You?"

"One," he said. "You've seen it?"

I hadn't.

"How many have you made?"

"Twenty," I said, "give or take."

We talked about the premise of his story: of a woman who decides to marry a man she does not love because she no longer trusts herself to meet a man she could love. Then, once the marriage is all set, she does meet the right guy. The right guy, as luck would have it, turns out to have only one hand, a grief-stricken attitude to life, and is her fiancé's younger brother.What does she do? For me, the story had all the elements of love and betrayal that have haunted me for so long. And there is the whole large family with all their complex relationships, their loves and betrayals, Cosmo's lover and Rose's temptation, Cosmo's father and how he fits into the family.

Once he relaxed I told him I thought he had a lousy title, long soliloquies that lacked focus, but I thought we could make it into a wonderful movie without changing what he had set out to write in the first place.We talked about the moon, a central image in the play, and its effect on how people behave. Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Donne, and all the Romantics had written about the moon, just as his Cosmo keeps pointing at the moon, as if it could explain something about human behavior. One of the grabby lines in the script comes from Perry, the NYU film professor and would-be lover, speaking to Rose about one of his students: "She's as bright and fresh and full of promise as moonlight in a martini." I loved that line.

We played with titles, all with the word "moon," and a couple of days later settled on Moonstruck. By then, he had signed on to work with me on the rewrite. He was the fastest writer I have ever worked with, understood every suggestion, did the whole thing in about two weeks. He had an uncanny ear for dialogue, original, poetic, funny, real. I nicknamed him "The Bard of the Bronx."

I was thinking about how and where to pitch it when I discovered that both Alan Ladd Jr., president of MGM/UA, and his assistant, John Goldwyn, were in town for the 1986 Toronto film festival. I had first met Laddy when he was involved with Star Wars in London and once had dinner with Sam, John's grandfather, alone, in his private dining room after The Russians Are Coming was released. I invited them both to my office, only a five-minute drive from the Four Seasons Hotel, where they were both staying.

I did my dance around a highly original romantic love story, great music, low budget, classy, it's time to do something extraordinary like this, something that doesn't require a thousand extras and special effects . . . yadda, yadda.

John Goldwyn had seen Shanley's Five Corners and liked it, so he was already intrigued.

"Laddy," I pushed on, "I want you to read it on the flight home. You've got five hours. It's a short script and I need a quick answer. This is hot."

"That good, huh?" he laughed.

They finished their coffee and left with the script, now clean and freshly typed, in Ladd's briefcase.

John Goldwyn called at around four o'clock the same afternoon. He loved it. Didn't just like it a lot, he loved it. He thought it was wonderful.

"Tell Laddy," I said, hopefully.

"How much would it cost?" Alan asked the next morning, calling from the airport.

"Ten. Not more than twelve," I said.

"Who do you see in the lead?"

"Cher, I think . . ."

"Cher? Hmmm.We'll get back to you."

Two days later we had a deal.

I had first seen Cher in the Sonny and Cher Show back in the "I Got You, Babe" days. Even then, buried in all that schmaltz, she had a tremendous sense of humor and sharp comic timing. "Oh, Norman," she told me when we met in her home in West Los Angeles, "nobody took me seriously back then." No one did until they saw her in Bob Altman's production of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean.

Then there was Silkwood, a heavy role for a serious actress, and Mask, in which she played the drug-addicted mother of a disfigured teenager. Though I wasn't fond of the movie itself, she and that young boy gave riveting performances. I think everyone knew what a chance she had taken with those two films.

"Loretta Castorini is Italian, her hair black, done in a dated style, flecked with gray, she's dressed in sensible, unfashionable clothes of a dark color" according to the script. She had not a drop of Italian blood in her veins, Cher told me. Perhaps some Cherokee. Cherilyn Sarkisian Bono Allman was born into a messy family: her mother had been married eight times, three of those times to her father, an Armenian. She was worried about the Brooklyn Italian accent.

"No problem," I said,"we'll get a voice coach. The important thing is you can do the part from your heart." I think Cher is in touch with the reality of ordinary people. They identify with her because they see themselves. She has no pretense, doesn't play the star unless it's so outrageously played-the big wigs, the Bob Mackie gowns-that everyone is in on the joke. She was "streety," honest and pragmatic, the ideal Loretta.

She had already read the script. She had laughed at parts, but she was still shooting Witches of Eastwick, which was, apart from the humor, a very different part from Loretta.

"Cher," I told her, "you're my first choice of any actress in the world. If you don't do this, you're going to regret it for the rest of your life. Films like Moonstruck don't come along often. It's such an unusual part, romantic, playful, passionate . . ."

Later, she told me one of the reasons she agreed was that she thought she was taking a chance again. She liked the fact that Loretta got a second chance, and that she took it. What Loretta did was look in the mirror and say to herself "If you do this you're crazy," and she does it anyway. She falls in love with her fiancé's brother, who is neither safe nor reliably sane.

When I cast the movie, what I had in mind was an opera: Loretta is the soprano, Rose the alto, Johnny is the baritone, Ronnie the tenor, Cosmo the bass. Music was a very important part of the movie. Right from the beginning when Loretta strides through the streets of Little Italy, Dean Martin's "That's Amore" sets the tone for a film that is both unabashedly romantic and joyfully self-mocking. The audience is cued to expect love, passion, and fun. The first scenes with Loretta are intercut with Lincoln Center, where Puccini's La Bohème is preparing to open. I wanted Puccini's hauntingly romantic music to underscore our Brooklyn Italian opera with Dean Martin's "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore!" as an overture.

Olympia Dukakis as the unflappable Rose Castorini was easy- hell, I had wanted to work with her for years. I had seen Danny Aiello and John Mahoney in House of Blue Leaves on Broadway, Vinny Gardenia had been in several movies, some of them Italian. Julie Bovasso was not only a brilliant choice for Rita Cappomaggi, she was also a professional acting coach, one who knew exactly how to teach a Brooklyn Italian accent. Cher got it in under two weeks!

I had seen Feodor Chaliapin Jr. in The Name of the Rose and had a hunch he'd be terrific as the grandfather. I called Sean Connery and asked if Chaliapin spoke English."Norman," Sean said, "he canna hear and he canna see but outside of that he is totally brilliant." Feodor was living in Italy at the time. He was the son of the great Russian opera singer Chaliapin and had actually met Puccini and Tchaikovsky. He told stories about having lunch with Stravinsky. He memorized the whole script so he wouldn't have to bother with trying to hear what was said.When he was in a scene, he watched for the other actor's lips to stop moving, then he gave his lines.

Ronnie was the hardest to cast. He was a tormented soul. Poetic. Dramatic. "Bring me the big knife. I'm gonna cut my throat!" "I lost my hand, I lost my bride. Johnny has his hand, Johnny has his bride!

You want me to take my heartbreak and put it away and forget it? . . ." These are some of his lines and he has to be able to say them so as to make the audience believe. Okay, so they can laugh a little, but they have to like him at the same time and empathize with his torment. The most tormented soul I knew who was right for the part was Nicolas Cage. Nicolas, whose name had been Coppola, had decided right at the start of his acting career to change it. He would not trade on his uncle's famous name. He changed it to Cage after a comic-book hero-for-hire who had been wrongly convicted, jailed, dunked in a chemical bath that disfigured him, etc. Only a tormented soul would pick a name in honor of a guy like that!

The trouble with Nicolas in 1986 was that he was death at the box office. Most of his films had bombed. I had to ask him to test for the part, though we both knew Nicolas didn't do tests. I told him the studio thought he was too young for the role. Cher was forty, Nicholas twenty-three, and he had to be credible as her lover. She was playing a thirty-seven-year old widow, but there was no indication of age for Ronnie. I told him not to shave for a couple of days, wear a white shirt and black tie but undo the black tie at the top. Formal but disheveled. He came to New York and baked bread all night in one of those old coal-fired ovens, and he worked on the accent with Danny Aiello so he started to sound like him.

Cher supported the idea of Cage. She even agreed to do the screen test with him: the one in the snow after the opera where Ronnie talks about the pain of love. And he was wonderful.

We shot the exteriors in New York. The bakery is in Cobble Hill. It had coal ovens, and an atmosphere we couldn't have duplicated anywhere else. Loretta's grandfather (played by Feodor Chaliapin) lives in Brooklyn and we shot all around a landmark house in Brooklyn, near the promenade where the old man takes his dogs for their walks. It's little Italy: family, working class, emotional. From there, there is a grand view of Manhattan.

Because we couldn't count on Cosmo's moon appearing on cue, David Watkin, our British director of photography and Academy Award winner for Out of Africa, made us a portable moon of two hundred fay lights attached to a giant cherry picker. It could roll out over the Manhattan skyline when we needed it and cast its magical spell over the unlikely loves and betrayals of Moonstruck. It was so bright it lit up two city blocks and fooled the birds into singing their dawn songs.

Cher won the Academy Award for best actress in 1987, Olympia Dukakis won best supporting actress, and Shanley won the Oscar for best original screenplay. I was nominated for best director and as the producer for best picture but lost in both categories to Bernardo Bertolucci and his film The Last Emperor. You can't fight two hundred Buddhist monks and the Forbidden City.

When Cher stood in front of the microphone, she thanked only her hair stylist and makeup man. Three days later, she took a full page in Variety to thank the cast, the crew, even the director. Cher was also awarded the prestigious David di Donatello Award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar. Olympia Dukakis, John Mahoney, and Danny Aiello all received a huge push in their careers from Moonstruck. Shanley went on to write and direct Joe Versus the Volcano for Spielberg.

For me, it was a moment of hope: that the pendulum was beginning at last to swing back from those endless, mindless action films, the obscene violence, the simplistic plots, to films where people actually talk to one another.

That was one of the things that had drawn me to In Country, the fact that people talk to one another, that they try so hard to piece together relationships, that the love of a young girl for her father can overcome the terrible self-hatred of a man who had sworn off human emotion so he could live with himself. In Country was also my tribute to the horrific trauma America had suffered-and is still suffering- as a result of the Vietnam war. The title of the film refers to time spent in Vietnam.

Eighty-two films about Vietnam had been made by the time I came to make mine in 1989. I think of it, even now, as a healing film, a film about love. And about real loss. It begins in Vietnam and ends with the Wall in Washington, and Bobbi Ann Mason's profoundly moving novel. It's about a rural Kentucky family-one I instinctively understood-grieving after the loss of a father, brother, son, and trying to come to terms with its reality. Frank Pierson wrote a sensitive and profound screenplay.

Bruce Willis did, I think, his finest bit of acting in that movie. He was already a big star then, but too often played the same character in different guises. The scene in In Country where he climbs a tree during a horrific thunderstorm and begs God to strike him dead is fully convincing, as is his stumbling relationship with the seventeen-yearold girl who is trying so desperately to understand something about her father, whom she had never known.

Terry Semel, then president of Warner Brothers, now the head of Yahoo, visited the set in Kentucky. Both he and Bob Daley felt that this was an emotionally charged movie.When the family drives to the Wall and Bruce Willis's character touches the name of his friend among the thousands of names, the film brings a kind of closure to the trauma of the war. It was not just the family on the screen, we were all weeping at the end of that movie.When we showed it to Warner Brothers' publicity and marketing bosses, they were all in tears.

When it was over, I walked off alone. It was a dark, gloomy afternoon. Raining.

In Country received a standing ovation at the Toronto Film Festival. In hindsight, though, I think the timing was perhaps too late.

America had already done its crying.