Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've been able to carve out spaces for myself. At Sundance, I'm in the mountains - my property is private. I get on a horse and ride for three, four hours. Sometimes five. I get lost. But when I'm in, I'm in.
From my experience in my country, America over and over again takes itself right to the brink, it puts one foot over but it never goes over. It wakes up at the last minute and says woah, and then pulls back...
The big moment for me was making 'All the President's Men'. It was not about Watergate or President Nixon. I wanted to focus on something I thought not many people knew about: How do journalists get the story?
Curiously, directing my own films have made me more tolerant and patient. I've always been an extremely impatient actor. Waiting around drove me nuts. But now I'm much more sympathetic to a director's struggle.
I was never a good student. I had to be dragged into kindergarten. It was hard to sit and listen to somebody talk. I wanted to be out, educated by experience and adventure, and I didn't know how to express that.
Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn't go too far out of the box.
Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings a certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn't go too far out of the box.
He's meant to be that classic Homer, Ulysses, Hercules - a character who goes out or has some gift of some kind. He goes on a journey of discovery and part of that is falling into darkness - the temptations of life.
As an actor and as a person you come together with being in familiar territory although that has not been my whole life. That's been a part of it. I think a lot of people associate me with the west because of Sundance.
I was producing things I was acting in, but I had never directed and I felt it was time. I was looking for a piece of material that was about behavior and feelings. When I read Judith Guest's book, I thought, This is it.
When I grew up, shame was used as a tool for check and balance. If you stood a chance of hearing someone say, "Shame on you," or "You should be ashamed of yourself," you thought twice. It doesn't seem to be a factor today.
For me, personally, skiing holds everything. I used to race cars, but skiing is a step beyond that. It removes the machinery and puts you one step closer to the elements. And it's a complete physical expression of freedom.
People are finally able to look around and say, 'I can see the drought, I can see the rising sea levels, I can see the crops dying. Okay, now I get it.' It is finally beginning to sink in that there has been a lot of damage.
Whereas money is a means to an end for a filmmaker, to the corporate mind money is the end. Right now, I think independent film is very confused, because there's excess pressure in the marketplace for entertainment to pay off.
Going to Santa Fe is like going to Greece. It's not that special compared to other areas. The pinon pines are no different than pinon pines elsewhere. But there has been culture there longer than in most places, and you feel it.
I spent two summers working at Camp Curry and at Yosemite Lodge as a waiter. It gave me a chance to really be there every day - to hike up to Vernal Falls or Nevada Falls. It just took me really deep into it. Yosemite claimed me.
Well first of all it's a business and it's a tough business, and you have to have the strength to survive all the set backs all the failures that make this a mean business, that's getting meaner and meaner every year in my opinion.
We've poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things have gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different. We're running out of resources and we are running out of time.
I enjoyed working with Dustin Hoffman. That was really fun. He decided that to really be effective as Woodward and Bernstein, considering their differences, we should spend some time together. Because Dustin and I were very different.
I don't know what your childhood was like, but we didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.
There is nothing I can do about this stuff and I am pretty well ok with the fact that I think Sundance is not going to be stopped by it, because he Festival is itself now, and doesn't need me out there to talk about it like I did years ago.
Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.
For 'Jeremiah Johnson,' nobody wanted to make that film. I went to Sydney Pollack, and I said, 'Sydney, I live in the mountains, and I would like to make a film about a person that had to exist in the mountains and survive in the mountains.'
Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal for me. I think, since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and my grandkids.
I was blessed to look well and retain a youthful look but that was just genes. I was disappointed when critics started pointing out my wrinkles. I thought, you mean this is what it's gonna be about now? I'm not going to be permitted to be human?
I had a mild case of polio - not enough to put me in an iron lung, but enough to keep me bedridden for weeks. As I came out of it, my mom wanted to do something for me. She realized that, growing up in the city, I'd missed out on a lot of nature.
When I started, I was an artist; I wanted to be an artist. I became an actor almost by accident. I acted for fifteen years and tried to produce. I looked for stories that were the story beneath the story that you thought you knew, like 'The Candidate'.
When people start thinking of you more as a persona, they are less inclined to allow you to move into different areas. Sometimes they're wrong. Sometimes they're just very stereotypical or restricted in their own thinking of what they'll allow you to do.
Between 18 and 19 years old [in the 1950s] I came to Paris. I studied art. And that experience really did change my life. I was living hand to mouth. I walked everywhere. I thought, this city is incredible but you really have to experience it by walking it.
What I would like to do is a thriller. I've been wanting to do that for a long time, but one that was not at all dependent on special effects. Just purely psychological, but will scare the hell out of you. That's what I would like to do. I have not found it yet.
I can't think of anything outside of having the gift yourself and creating yourself. I can't think of the next better thing to do than being able to put it back. Creative expression, I think, is vital to the success of any society.... A society without art will die.
The way I deal with arthritis is to keep moving. As long as I can play hard tennis, as long as I can ski or ride a horse - all kinds of things can come your way. As long as you can, do it. People who retire die. My dad retired and died shortly after. Just keep moving.
Politics right now is in a very dark place, and I think the only place for me is to do what I do - make films, create art, watch it as it evolves. Right now it's like Humpty Dumpty sitting on a wall, and a great fall is happening. The behavior seems to be really dumb.
It's a creative enterprise, just like art, just like painting, music. Creating something can be done in different categories, so to do it in film is just another expression, which is great. Because it translates so well because so many people see the work, if you're lucky.
I had just arrived in New York from California. I was nineteen years old and excited beyond belief. I was an art student and an acting student and behaved as most young actors did - meaning that there was no such thing as a good actor, 'cause you yourself hadn't shown up yet.
Sundance started with two acres back in 1963 that I bought from a sheepherder for $500. What has happened, I could see development starting to descend on the state of Utah. I thought I had better acquire more land to protect it. I thought that would probably be my legacy, to protect land.
I'm interested in that thing that happens where there's a breaking point for some people and not for others. You go through such hardship, things that are almost impossibly difficult, and there's no sign that it's going to get any better, and that's the point when people quit. But some don't.
The way you really find out about the performer's seriousness about the cause is how long they stay with it when the spotlight gets turned off. You see a lot of celebrities switch gears. They go from the environment to animal rights to obesity or whatever. That I don't have a lot of respect for.
The meter is ticking [particularly in the face of climate change], so you've got to get to as much as you can as fast as you can. I grew up with 'This Land Is Our Land,' and public land doesn't belong to that administration or this one. We want our kids to grow up with real natural places, not just photos of them.
Now is not the time to repudiate environmental balance, but rather it is the time for all of us to work together - politician, advocate, rancher, scientist, and citizen. Only by doing this will the United States move forward and be a leader in environmental issues and ensure sustainability to our delicate ecosystem.
All of the films that I've made are about the country I live in and grew up in... And I think if you're going to put an artist's eye to it, you're going to put a critical eye to it. I've always been interested in the gray area that exists between the black and white, or the red and blue, and that's where complexity lies.
I would see my hometown, Los Angeles, change. Green space and orange groves gave way to cement, freeways flooded with traffic, and air pollution, all in the name of "progress." I felt like I was losing my home. It had a profound effect on me, and I realized just how important nature was to my spirit, my soul, my point of view.
In 1973, I was shown a graphic of how dependent the United States was on nonrenewable resources like oil and coal and that little was being done to change that. It seemed irrefutable that we needed a change in direction or we'd be paying a huge price down the road. That's when I made a commitment to become a political activist.
There's a lot of hyperventilation that takes off before the [Sundance Film] Festival, a lot of buzz. Every year we hear, this is going to be the new this, this is going to be the new that, and it never is. The buzz just doesn't mean anything. I'm glad it doesn't. Because I think the festival shows that what succeeds is content.
I guess I don't like the fact that my life is becoming less and less my own - the prevailing attitude that you have an obligation to deliver yourself to the public. Actually, you're delivered to the public whether you like it or not. I guess if you don't like it, you should stop doing what provokes it. In my case, that's acting.
I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.
I think there was something that made us not pay attention to climate change. Something that was up there. There was a saying when we were trying to pay attention to the environment that people used this phrase NIMBY - not in my back yard. People were saying, ‘I don’t care, it is not in my back yard.’ But now it’s in everyone’s back yard.
When you're making a movie, you don't think about the outcome. That's something I'm grateful for: whenever I go and do a new project, I never think about the outcome. It's always just about the work at hand. That's the fun part. The other part is always something I've had a struggle with, which is promoting the film. I know it's important.
It felt to me like America was always wanting to resolve things too quickly, without thinking through what the costs and consequences would be and how that affects an individual living in that world. Then as I grew up and went about my life, I think I just got more and more interested in that gray area where things are not so easily quantified.
I have faith in the pendulum swinging. Right now it's so far against the wall that it can't go any farther; it's gonna start to swing back. That's my optimism. One of the cures is gonna be getting the American people to fully wake up. All the American people, particularly young people, because they're gonna inherit this earth; they're gonna inherit what we're doing.