Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Not one Wall Street executive has been charged with crimes since the 2008 financial crash.
From my image of digging around in the mud like a grunt, I preferred fighting the war from ships.
I think that we should remember that social change can happen when people join together with some strength.
I am part of a system which encourages people to buy things and do things which are not to their best interest.
See, New York is over the hill. It's swallowed up in its own garbage. And the people - I can't stand the people.
When they speak about 'We the people...,' we the people have to have a voice. It can't just be the establishment voice.
We have a responsibility to show the public the kinds of truths that they don't see on the TV news or the Hollywood film.
One person has a responsibility not just for himself but for inter-relationships with the existences of others and the world.
If you're making commercials which sell products which are unhealthy or which are unnecessary, I think that you are part of a system.
I'd say to anyone trying to break into the business: Don't just be interested in movies. Be interested in life. Be a person. Be in touch.
I am a Chicagoan. I feel like I've simply been on vacation for 10 years in Los Angeles. But Chicago is a real place, and L.A. is a motel.
I'd say to anyone trying to break into the business, 'Don't just be interested in movies. Be interested in life. Be a person. Be in touch.'
Making a film - particularly what I think is a good film - is the result of a team of people, and the end result has many, many hands on it.
I think that the whole voyeuristic attitude of filmmakers or of me personally - of shooting documentaries and so forth - is an important issue.
I felt that that experience, because of the responsible nature that I found I acted all during that traumatic time, that I felt that I was a man.
We, as film-makers, are privileged. We can make people cry or laugh. We can make them think and feel. It is a great privilege and a great responsibility.
I don't know why I developed a social consciousness, but I really think I have a consciousness; I feel connected to everything and everybody in the world.
There is a very particular feeling I get when I have the camera in my hand, looking at an actor talk, knowing that what I’m shooting will end up on the screen.
I don't believe in publicity before a film is completed. It costs you money and wastes your energy, and you're inflating your balloon before you have a balloon.
As a cameraman, I am interested in images and truth. Today, people are conditioned to accept lies if they are commercial lies. What we don't see anymore is ethics.
Most people, I believe, when they're asked profound questions about their own persona are not really able to enunciate it, because it's a combination of so many things.
Professional cinema image-taking should integrate, serve, interest, and enhance the story. I judge cinematography not just for a story well told but for what the story is.
There's a scene in 'Medium Cool' in which a young man walks by with a sign that says, 'Sanity, please.' If anything summarizes what I was feeling at that time, it is that sign.
I've been in wars and in riots and hung out of many helicopters in the early days. And there's a detachment that happens when you look through the camera. You're looking for the shot.
My mother let me know that we're all connected. If some of us become more affluent it's not because we're better or even smarter people - we have a responsibility to ourselves to be a good boy.
Lighting was very primitive. And still it was really the way to learn because sometimes some of the modern technology is so extreme and so compartmentalized that we lose sight of exactly what we're doing.
Movies are a voyeuristic experience. You have to make the audience feel like they are peeking through a keyhole. I think of myself as the audience. Then I use light, framing, and motion to create a focal point.
I used it in a shot where Richard Burton goes down the hall to get a gun in a closet. And I wanted to get some excitement, and the hallway was too narrow for the dollies that they had at that time. So it was quite useful.
The idea of accountability in Vietnam, Nicaragua and now Iraq - the media never has that in its quiver. When you see time after time there is no possibility of Nuremberg [war crime trials], we're doomed to have it repeated.
The best thing that winning those Academy Awards things are - the best thing of it is that when I say some of my ideas, somebody's going to listen to it, and they'll preface what I say, 'Academy Award winner da-da-da-da-da.'
When I was in Vietnam with Jane Fonda, I was shooting a farmer in a field - just a pastoral scene. And while I was shooting him, an explosion occurred right - he blew up right in my lens, so to speak. And he had stepped on a landmine.
When you hear the word tear gas you think, well, your eyes will burn and that's it. But that whole feeling of your whole skin burning, that you can't breathe, you can't inhale, you feel suffocated - it's a very, very terrifying experience.
Now, I have to - in my defense, I have the say that general knowledge of the deadly nature of cigarettes was not primarily in my mind and nor was it on these poor cowboys, who - many of whom who've died of emphysema since we were shooting.
I rationalize out, well, how much help could you really be, you know? And maybe if people saw this, they'd realize the brutality of war and figure out there's got to be some better way than killing human beings who are just trying to farm a field.
In "Virginia Woolf" I had a thing which the grips called the paraplegic which was a wheelchair thing that I had made up years before where I could stand on this bicycle-like device and be pushed down the hall, and then step off it with a handheld camera.
Documentary people have to know that, particularly nowadays, they have to be on a mission. And part of the mission is to - is to be like good journalists: search for the truth, have an open mind, listen to as much as you can of different sides of things.
I don't attack any kind of script or shooting with some philosophy that is discernible even to myself. It might just be art and love: When I got my Academy Award for 'Virginia Woolf' in the middle of the Vietnam War, I said, 'I hope we can use our art for peace and love.'
When people have problems with their mortgages and jobs many feel they're a failure, they didn't work hard enough or speak well enough: It's their fault things are going so bad. When they see their bodies right there [at occupations], we have something profoundly in common.
The helicopter was a U.S. Navy helicopter. There were no civilian helicopters available to film companies, so they just made some stuff out of two-by-four wood. And I would straddle a two-by-four out from the helicopter with a camera and what we call a high hat, which is a low metal stand.
Employers will work you longer for less money and under questionable safety conditions because it is their duty to prioritize the bottom line. As individuals, we cannot complain. That's why we need a union to speak for us, certainly when our safety, our health, and our very lives are at stake!
There was no actually stock footage in "Medium Cool." I wrote the script. I wrote the riots. And I integrated the actors in the film in the park during the demonstrations. But nowhere was it like we had stock footage and then later, in editing, integrated it into the film. It was all done at the time.
I was a sailor. I was torpedoed, spent two weeks in a lifeboat. I was on the Murmansk run; I worked a 20 mm. machine gun, helped bring down a Stuka, all that kind of stuff. I've got letters from Franklin Roosevelt for things I did then. But those kind of credentials didn't work for you in the Cold War.
I think that it gave me a really strong feeling of my life force and a confidence in myself. I felt like I was a man. Before that point for some reason, I always felt I was a boy (laughter). In fact, they called me the baby on the ship 'cause I was the youngest guy on the ship. But I always felt that way.
When I started, we had just the camera and the person, mostly. And if you wanted to do a dolly shot, particularly working in Chicago where I began, you'd get in the back trunk of a car, and you'd have a friend drive the car, or you'd get in some kid's little wagon that he plays with and have someone pull that for dolly shots.
Well, there is a contradiction in a sense. If you're making commercials which sell products which are unhealthy or which are unnecessary, I think that you are part of a system - I am part of a system which encourages people to buy things and do things which are not to their best interest. And to that extent you could say it was contradictory.
Well, of course the general idea was dreamed up by the advertising agency and so my job was to realize that. And we down to Lubbock, Texas, usually and onto a ranch and we would pick cowboys who looked the part and photograph them under dramatic situations - rounding up wild horses or running through streams and then reaching in and taking a drag on a cigarette.
I think that the whole voyeuristic attitude of filmmakers or of me personally - of shooting documentaries and so forth - is an important issue. And it was an important issue to me, personally. And the whole question of when - when do you put the camera down or when do you keep shooting to get the shot. And a number of times in my life I've had that question hit me very hard.
That force - which the system tried to laugh at - when it finally broke through and the movement was recognized, the media said they were "just a bunch of spoiled kids, dope smokers [who] don't know what the hell they want." To demean it as something laughable - but that didn't work for very long. It's still an ongoing struggle; they're trying to find out how to fight. It's very exciting times.
I don't know where you're reading all this stuff, but it's pretty accurate, yes. It was in 1942. I was on a ship called the Accelo(ph) coming back from the Red Sea and we were sunk off the coast of Africa by a German submarine. And I was in a lifeboat for 14 days and landed and lived with the Pondos in South Africa while - who took care of us and took care of me. I had some wound in my left leg.
When I search myself carefully I do think it's from my mother. I even feel strange saying that. Most people, I believe, when they're asked profound questions about their own persona are not really able to enunciate it, because it's a combination of so many things. But certainly influences early on that I felt from my mother. I wouldn't say she was "political" per se; she was sensitive to other people.