Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.
One thing about being successful is that I stopped being afraid of dying. Once you're a star you're dead already. You're embalmed.
It's very painful for us to feel we deserve a life. That's the toughest thing. That we deserve to have a life. That can take a lifetime.
I like to mimic my grandkids. I'm trying to understand the intensity of fixation on a leaf. Kids don't need anything else in their life.
I believe - though I may be wrong, because I'm no expert - that this war is about what most wars are about: hegemony, money, power and oil.
Now, I'm simply working with people I want to work with. I just want to have good working experiences and let the dice fall where they may.
Canada is like a nice family living over a biker bar . . . They keep telling the downstairs neighbors to keep down the noise, people are trying to sleep.
I hope to God I don't win an Oscar tomorrow night. It would really depress me if I did. I really don't deserve it. It wasn't that important a part anyhow.
Well this is aptly called a junket, for both of us. I have never been to a house of prostitution, but I understand that you get in more than seven minutes.
Many actors want to play Hamlet and Macbeth. Ever since I became an actor, from the very beginning I just wanted to play a Shetland pony. I cannot explain why
I got into acting so that I could meet girls. Pretty girls came later. First, I wanted to start off with someone with two legs, who'd smile at me and look soft.
Well first of all, it's hard to shoot a movie and break for a long time and then come back and do, in a sense, one of the biggest scenes that each character had.
You spend so much of your life basing yourself on what you think other people think of you. Then you realise that maybe one of the purposes of life is not to care.
Well, 45-odd years of doing it, so we all pile up the things we like about directors and the things we don't like about directors. And sometimes they're very similar.
I stopped working a few years ago because I just lost a spark that I'd had before. I thought I'd just try writing, and maybe start directing, but I did it very quietly.
I wanted to find my limitations so I decided to do Shylock. And if I fail? I've never been afraid of that. I have other fears - doing bad work knowingly is the worst fear.
There's a new medical crisis. Doctors are reporting that many men are having allergic reactions to latex condoms. They say they cause severe swelling. So what's the problem?
And that's another reason to make this movie: We can put plays on film now, at a relatively small cost, and they will reach an audience they would never have reached otherwise.
There is something unnatural about marriage. These two people are not going to be the same people in a few years. The trick is to live your own life while sharing the same space.
If you have this enormous talent, it's got you by the balls, it's a demon. You can't be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal. Dickens wasn't that nice a guy.
I think there's always going to be some kind of bigotry or some kind of racism. There has to be, because people can't feel that they have any hero qualities unless there's someone beneath them.
The better you are as a parent, the richer the nest you've built, the more difficult it is for your kids to leave. So they have to invent things to dislike about you. And they're brilliant at it.
What makes divorce happen is that you can't be in the same space any more, for whatever reason - but the love stays. And that's the killer. That's where the vehemence and anger and rage comes from.
So, they had this 40-odd year friendship with each other and with Mr Harwood. So, when I came on it Albert, Tom and Maggie were in the cast. But then Albert wasn't up for it, so he had to withdraw.
For me as an American, the most painful aspect of this is that I believe that administration has taken the events of 9/11 and has manipulated the grief of the country and I think that's reprehensible.
There's a rebirth that goes on with us continuously as human beings. I don't understand, personally, how you can be bored. I can understand how you can be depressed, but I just don't understand boredom.
For me as an American, the most painful aspect of this is that I believe that that administration has taken the events of 9/11 and has manipulated the grief of the country and I think that's reprehensible.
I think 'retirement' goes hand in hand with people who make a living by having a 'job.' I don't think we-the .00001 percent of the population who are so fortunate to love passionately what we do-consider it a 'job.
Look at the studio filled with glamorous merchandise. Fabulous and exciting bonus prizes. Thousands of dollars in cash. Over $150,000 just waiting to be won as we present our big bonanza of cash on Wheel Of Fortune.
Poverty is not dated. Homeless people have looked the same since the thirteenth century. Go back to the times of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Look at photographs. It's amazing. The face on a homeless person is timeless.
The plight of the actor, even if he's a star, is the plight of the women's movement. They're saying the same thing to us: get into bed, give me a good time, then give me something to eat, go get the laundry, be a good girl.
We all believe what we read. I read how Tom Cruise and I were two big egos holding up shooting. I know that isn't true - but if I wasn't making a movie with him and I just picked up the paper, I'd believe it. That's interesting, isn't it?
Acting didn't solve much! If it did, I would have ended up much less crazy than I am today, but I'm not. At least for me, acting is a relief - a relief to be able to admit certain things about myself and disguise in my work, in my characters.
I mean, I don't think I'm alone when I look at the homeless person or the bum or the psychotic or the drunk or the drug addict or the criminal and see their baby pictures in my mind's eye. You don't think they were cute like every other baby?
So when I told my parents I wanted to go into acting because I was flunking out of my first year of junior college, they were relieved that I had picked something other than joining the army. But I can't imagine how they had high hopes for me.
Someone once said to me, 'Some of us choose to live with a lifeboat just a little bit out of our reach.' I'd like to reach a point where I no longer bullshit myself. I think that's the natural human condition - to lie to yourself. Because the truth is painful.
I think we all felt it on this movie - crew and cast. You never know when you're making a movie... no one is saying in the middle of Casablanca that this is going to be a classic. The lead actors had turned it down and I think they wound up with B-list actors at the time.
Money is another pressure. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that there's a certain luxury in having no money. I spent ten years in New York not having it, not worrying about it. Suddenly you have it, then you worry, where is it going? Am I doing the right thing with it?
My wife always says that I will be stuck with this forever: I am the difficult one. With Jack Nicholson they always said it was drugs. Warren Beatty is supposed to have screwed everything that jumped off the curve. I'll tell you, in reality a few of us had as many girls as Warren.
There were a few things that went into it. When you're doing something you're trying to be your audience at the same time, so if somebody tells me that this is a movie about retired opera singers, you think 'maybe I'll wait for it to come to DVD'. You're not rushing off to see it.
People like Johnny Depp are an exception. He is the current model of what an actor should be. His body of work speaks volumes. He was so under-rated for so long, but he will have longevity - and it is such a gratifying thrill to see he is finally getting the recognition he deserves.
I knew that we had an obligation and that was to keep an energy in it and try to keep the audience interested. In fact, I asked some of the actors to take a look at His Girl Friday, a Howard Hawks film with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant, because they talk over each other and there's a great energy.
Usually, those people don't even like actors and they can't wait until they get in the cutting room. They kind of break down in categories: directors who like to be surprised and some of them abhor being surprised. As far as directing, we all direct when we're acting in movies... every single one of us.
In terms of the stars, the only ones I cast were Billy Connolly and Pauline Collins. I was in Los Angeles working and a lot of this took place on the telephone. I'd met Maggie [Smith] once and I'd come back-stage, which I'm usually loathe to do because as an actor you don't want people coming back because you want to get home [laughs].
You're always in a tunnel that you can't see the end of. But there's something that took place on this movie that I don't think we expected and that was that once we decided that the entire cast would be real retired opera singers and retired musicians... and these people the phone hadn't rung for them for 20 or 40 years even though they can deliver.
I wanted to be a jazz pianist, but I wasn't good enough. I got into city college because I didn't have the grades to get into university. I took acting because it was a way to get three credits. I just needed three credits and my friend told me to take acting because it was like gym - nobody fails you. I took it and that's literally how I got involved in acting.
I walked out of the theater and started crying. My wife asked me, 'Why are you crying?' I said, 'Because I can't do that.' I didn't know how he did it. I've never seen anything like that. It's like this feat, this Rodin sculpture to me. It's like hearing an opera singer and the tears go down your face because it's not human what they're doing. It's like sounds of heaven.
I came in on this movie after there had been a director and I came in after Tom Courtenay had talked to Ron Harwood about making a movie. So, you know Tom and Albert Finney had been friends since the beginning of their career as they became stars around the same time - Tom always reminds me that Albert was first with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and then Tom with The Long Distance Runner.
I think one of the things you have to be aware of as an actor is that if you come on the set and see the director standing there mouthing all the words while a scene is going on, that's usually a very bad sign because it means the director has already shot the scene in his head. He knows exactly the rhythm and the nuances that he wants delivered in the line and you're not going to dissuade him.
This is not a movie about smelling the urine! It's another kind of movie." Volker Schlöndorff got Billy Wilder to agree to these conversations - you can buy it - because Volker spoke German at times. And he said to Billy Wilder: "What is in your mind?" And he said: "If you're going to try to tell the truth to the audience, you'd better be funny or they'll kill you." And I haven't forgotten that.