Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I used to love going into local hardware stores, to look at little things they made locally. Nowadays it's harder, though you can still do it in Vietnam.
In kindergarten that used to be my job, to tell them fairytales. I liked Hans Christian Andersen, and the Grimm fairy tales, all the classic fairy tales.
An essential element of any art is risk. If you don't take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn't been seen before?
I was terrible at maths, but I could grasp science, and I used to love to read about the lives of the scientists. I wanted to be a scientist or an inventor.
The professional world was much more unpleasant than I thought. I was always wishing I could get back that enthusiasm I had when I was doing shows at college.
The whole reason one wants to do lower budget films is because the lower the budget, the bigger the ideas, the bigger the themes, the more interesting the art.
When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.
I was excited to discover, in this tale by Eliade, the key themes that I most hope to understand better - time, consciousness and the dream-like basis of reality.
You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost.
I think it's better to be overly ambitious and fail than to be underambitious and succeed in a mundane way. I have been very fortunate. I failed upward in my life!
You're in a profession in which absolutely everybody is telling you their opinion, which is different. That's one of the reasons George Lucas never directed again.
When newspapers started to publish the box office scores of movies, I was horrified. Those results are totally fake because they never include the promotion budget.
The stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered the good work.
My company and people think I'm wacky when I have an idea... I know if I have an idea, no one will want to go through it. But if I persist, people will go through it.
When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.
I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies.
We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.
They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.
I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In 'The Godfather' it was succession. In 'The Conversation' it was privacy. In 'Apocalypse' it was morality.
One thing that I'm sure of is the real pleasure of life - it's not being known, it's not having your own jet plane, it's not having a mansion the pleasure is to learn something
Most Italians who came to this country are very patriotic. There was this exciting possibility that if you worked real hard, and you loved something, you could become successful.
It is a little disappointing to see that your legs are not as strong. But I like the idea of growing old, and the thought of approaching death is not particularly daunting to me.
All of a sudden, there are great Japanese films, or great Italian films, or great Australian films. It's usually because there are a number of people that cross-pollinated each other.
Being a former theater student, of course, there is a part of me that is fascinated with stage crafts and what you can do with illusions and working within the confines of the studio.
Sound is your friend because sound is much cheaper than picture, but it has equal effect on the audience - in some ways, perhaps more effect because it does it in a very indirect way.
That's part of the requirement for me to be an artist is that you're trying to share your personal existence with others and trying to illuminate modern life, trying to understand life.
I live near San Francisco in the most beautiful spot on earth and enjoy myself in many ways. Yes, I love to work, which for now is to think and read and write, so it's all a dream come true.
My big goal in life was always to figure out how I can make a lot of money so I can go off and make films irrespective of the opinion of the three or four critics who seem to rule the roost.
Although knowledge of structure is helpful, real creativity comes from leaps of faith in which you jump to something illogical. But those leaps form the memorable moments in movies and plays.
The essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.
I've been failing for, like, ten or eleven years. When it turns, it'll turn. Right now I'm just trying to squeeze through a very tight financial period, get the movie out, and put my things in order.
When that happens - when risk is taken and the filmmakers dive into the subject matter without a parachute - very often what you get it something with those qualities that make it age well with the public.
When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That's what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was 'You're a Big Boy Now.'
It's ironic that at age 32, at probably the greatest moment of my career, with The Godfather having such an enormous success, I wasn't even aware of it, because I was somewhere else under the deadline again.
My family were symphonic musicians and in the opera. Also, it was my era, the love of radio. We used to listen to the radio at night, close our eyes and see movies far more beautiful than you can photograph.
The only TV I would be interested in exploring would be live television. There's no substitute for a team of artists performing at their peak live when failure is possible. It's a high-wire act. That excites me.
I like to work in the morning. I like to sometimes go to a place where I'm all alone where I'm not going to get a phone call early that hurts my feelings, because once my feelings are hurt, I'm dead in the water.
I've been blessed with enough wealth that I can make a film myself up to a certain budget. So one way I thought I would reinvent myself was just to make these very small, personal films that I've financed myself.
If you're not allowed to experiment anymore for fear of being considered self-indulgent or pretentious or what have you, then everyone's going to just stick to the rules - there's not going to be any additional ideas.
I have much to learn from my daughter Sofia. Her minimalism exposes my limitations: I'm too instinctive and operatic, I put too much heart into my work, I get lost sometimes in bizarre things - it's my Italian heritage.
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school, they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button.
Always make your work be personal. And, you never have to lie... There is something we know that's connected with beauty and truth. There is something ancient. We know that art is about beauty, and therefore it has to be about truth.
I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.
Steven Spielberg is unique. I feel that the kinds of movies he loves are the same kinds of movies that the big mass audience loves. He's very fortunate because he can do the things he naturally likes the best, and he's been very successful.
When a movie is about to come out on its initial debut, there are a lot of people involved - the financiers, the studio and the producers and also, many times, the foreign distributors. So it is a time of tremendous pressure and uncertainty.
I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.
People feel the worst film I made was 'Jack.' But to this day, when I get checks from old movies I've made, 'Jack' is one of the biggest ones. No one knows that. If people hate the movie, they hate the movie. I just wanted to work with Robin Williams.
I've been offered lots of movies. There's always some actor who's doing a project and would like to have me do it. But you look at the project and think, 'Gee, there are a lot of good directors who could do that.' I'd like to do something only I can do.
I don't go on set with an army of people because the most expensive elements of a movie production are the plane tickets, the hotel rooms, food and gasoline. If you're willing to discover new colleagues in the place that you are, you can save a ton of money.