Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My mum was a peacemaker, and in personal things I tend to do that, because I can't deal with personal conflict. I find that horrible.
The older you get the more new memories get wiped out, and you end up remembering more about your early life than what you did last week.
Gordon Brown is and always will be committed to the interests of big business, so there's no way I want to be involved in the Labour Party again.
The problem is, if you make a film that has certain implications in the story, and then you don't follow through, it's a cop out really, isn't it?
If change is to come, it must come from the working class. That's why telling their story is important. That's why knowing our history is important.
I challenge the idea that films about rich people are escapism and films about working class people are dour and sad. I find the opposite's the case.
I think people think of auteurs as being a dictator shouting over everyone about his vision. That's not the way I think of auteurs or the way I work.
About Thatcher's death: Let's privatise her funeral. Put it out on competetive tender and accept the cheapest bid. That's what she would have wanted.
You'll get unsociable people whatever the nationality, colour, race or creed. I guess the British abroad have probably got the worst record of anyone.
It's time to put back on the agenda the importance of public ownership and public good, the value of working together collaboratively, not in competition.
Preparation is really important for actors; they need to know who they are, where they're from, and the experiences up to the point that we make the film.
If you're a politician, you can see there might be times when, to secure the greater good, you have to take a backwards step. That is a matter of tactics.
A film is one small voice among other large ones. The film is a tiny part of the discourse. You do what you can but under no illusions of what a film can do.
I don't think films about working class people are sad at all; I think they're funny and lively and invigorating and warm and generous and full of good things.
People talk about Thatcherism all the time. I felt it was important to record the memories of those almost written out of history who upheld the spirit of '45.
After 'The Gamekeeper' I made one other film called 'Looks and Smiles,' but making British films was very difficult. There wasn't a tradition of British cinema.
Every four or five films we've made a film that has gone on TV first. It's quite nice to tap into the TV audience, but it is nice to see it on the big screen too.
Jeremy Corbyn's election was the most hopeful thing since the Labour Party began. He's the first Labour leader who's ever stood on the picket line along with workers.
What strikes me - we're apparently at the mercy of an economic system that will never work and the big question is, how do we change it, not how do we put up with it.
The European Union is an institution that is in the interest of big business, not the European people. So it's understandable that some people thought we should leave.
If we believe in the free market, then that leads to the big corporations taking power, that leads to this competition to lower wages, and that leads to precarious work.
There are different cinema traditions in France, Spain and other European countries. There's a much stronger intellectual tradition: cinema is seen in a more serious way.
A journalist uses the most precise words he or she can. An artist does the same sort of thing. You gather material about a particular subject, you refine it as best you can.
One lesson to learn is that the press and the broadcasters are not neutral. And it seems we have to learn it each time there is a dispute: they are actually committed to one side.
You've only got to look at a film to see that it has to be collaborative - the images, the performances and all the art direction and the costume, everything shrieks collaboration.
I hate programmes where some TV personality looks you in the eye and tells you what to think - the Andrew Marr version of history. I hate the authorial voice telling you what to think.
How families interact is not some abstract concept of mother, son, father, daughter; it has to do with economic circumstances, the work they do, the time they can spend with each other.
The worst thing about being a freelance film director is that you're scrambling around Soho with a briefcase, looking for somewhere to make phone calls. That was my position for 10 years.
For the writers I have worked with and for me, the relationship between the personal comedy of daily life and the economic context in which that life happens has always been very significant.
The thing is, it's much easier to be a rightwing populist than a leftwing one, because the left always have to explain why things are the way they are. The right can just blame the foreigners.
Film is one small voice in a great cacophony of noise from newspapers, from the television, from social media, so it can have a little dent, you know? It can help to create a climate of opinion.
Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.
The far right was on the march in the 1930s, and we defeated the fascists through a great united working-class effort. That sense of unity and strength is what gave people confidence to change things.
I think it's time British filmmakers stopped allowing themselves to be colonized so ruthlessly by U.S. ideas and stopped looking so slavishly to the U.S. market. It demeans filmmaking when they do that.
History is for all of us to discuss. All history is our common heritage to discuss and analyze. The founding of the state of Israel, for example, based on ethnic cleansing is there for us all to discuss.
There has been no more principled opposition to racism than Jeremy Corbyn: he was getting arrested for protesting against Apartheid when the rest of them were doing deals and calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist.
We made 'The Wind That Shakes the Barley' about the war of independence and the civil war, which were the pivotal moments of Irish history, really. 'Jimmy's Hall' would seem to be a smaller story 10 years later.
The old Craven Cottage stadium at Fulham, before they built the river stand; that was a great place to watch football. When the football wasn't very good, people used to turn around and watch the boats on the river.
There's so much control, so many executive producers, so many people looking over their shoulder, so many people trying to second-guess the boss. The space for writers and directors and actors to be creative is zilch.
Well, I think by and large, certainly in terms of cinema, American culture dominates our cinema, mainly in the films that are shown in the multiplexes but also in the way that it has a magnetic effect on British films.
In the 1980s, I had a lot of films, documentaries for television, which were about why the trade unions had failed to organize resistance to Margaret Thatcher's plans. And they were banned. I had to fight for those films.
My father worked in a factory and as a child it felt very secure. It felt very secure because everybody had work, the schools were free, so there was a security of knowing that the war had finished and families would come together again.
Iain Duncan Smith and his regime, they wanted to make the poor suffer and then humiliated them by telling them that their poverty was their own fault and, to demonstrate that, if you're not up to mark then you're sanctioned and the money stops.
No political politicians on the board and stop sub-contracting anyway, which means getting out of Iraq. If anything needs to be policed, it needs to be done through a proper international body... not through us sub-contracting teams of mercenaries.
It's what people have always done. They have always told stories, put on plays. It's characters and narrative and thought and context and resolution so you reflect the way the world is in some way. It comes out of experience. I think it's OK to do that.
Bath was dusty and a little shabby when we moved here. It did look its age and you felt its history in its streets and buildings and little alleyways. The sense of the past was palpable. There were some bad modern buildings but there was a patina of age.
The job of the director is to make certain that the film has one voice and a sense of a single vision, even though it's produced by a large number of people making contributions - to turn all those contributions from individual voices into one coherent one.
Churchill the right-winger has been elevated to a status where you can't criticise him. People from the time remember him as an imperialist, a hard-right politician, very instrumental in the oppression of Ireland and the attempt to defeat the general strike.
If all political parties are committed to the role of the free market, the politicians act as, I don't know, as traffic policemen; they stand outside the ring and let the real decisions be slugged out by entrepreneurs. That doesn't seem to me a proper democracy.
Film can do lots of things: It can produce alternative ideas, ask questions, just record the reality of what's happening, it can analyze what's happening. Of course, most commercial films are controlled by big corporations who have an interest in not doing those films.