Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's very difficult to be original.
I always fish out antique ideas, very old ideas.
The American public is a very specialized public.
I realized than an author cannot also be a producer.
I was born with this bow tie made of celluloid on my collar.
The first must that any director has is to not force his public.
I had never thought of making a western even as I was making it.
Producing films was a distraction for me for which I payed dearly.
I've always believed that true cinema is cinema of the imagination.
I really do believe that the Jesuit system is better for a country.
It's very easy with the camera to show the positive side of something.
I don't want to do a war film per se. Nor do I want to do a political film.
Virginia Woolf was one example. She was called the "Lover of 100 Gangsters."
I've shot films in Africa. I've shot in America - English is not my language.
I admit that some of my ideas may have turned out to be pessimistic in nature.
I think even in American schools, they must be studying in a specialized manner.
I think women have always been considered objects, especially in the genre of westerns.
There are directors, and there are authors. I think I am more of an author than a director.
My mother was an actress. My father was an actor and a director. I am the son of filmmakers.
Where life had no value, death, sometimes, had its price. That is why the bounty killers appeared.
America is so varied and exciting that after six months, you go back and find it completely changed.
It's difficult to find new solicitations, new expressions. But this is talking about filmmaking. Cinema.
It is hard to do a film that wants to say something because, unfortunately, most everything has been said.
I think that men of my generation - not me in particular - are among the most fortunate men in the universe.
The function of the flashback is Freudian...You have to let them wander like the imagination or like a dream.
My life, my reading, everything about me revolves around the cinema. So for me, cinema is life, and vice-versa.
It is clear that the vehicle of the western was a very interesting vehicle for me to contraband some of my ideas.
I am searching as Diogenes did with his lantern for all of these wonderful human beings. I haven't found them yet.
I can't see America any other way than with a European's eyes. It fascinates me and terrifies me at the same time.
I don't enter into particulars with [Ennio Morricone]. I give him the feeling and the suggestions of the characters.
If there is an auteur who influenced me - and there is only one - that is Charlie Chaplin. And he never won an Oscar.
All the people I've met, many outside of cinema, knew everything perfectly about one thing or one subject or one area.
Women had enormous weight in America. And they still have. Because they are truly the padrone [owners, masters] of America.
My films are often characterized by the lack of women present in them, except for this last one [Once Upon a Time in America].
Sometimes, I even recite the role to the actor if it's not clear. And I beg them not to imitate me, because I'm not a good actor.
When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.
In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life - in jeeps - and upset all my dreams.
I have to be honest about one thing. When I want to America, no on asked me how I was. Everyone always asked me, "How much do you make?"
It [film-making] really just has to do with my own ghosts and phantoms. And I have to say, in the end, it's just my way of seeing things.
I think politics should be expressed in this way and not in other ways. And not just politics - sentiments, even certain states of being.
There was also the myth of the western films. But my films are borrowed not from the story of the West in America but from the story of cinema.
I've always had the sensation that people in America are always avant-garde. Very attentive to all the new innovations. But it's very specialized.
When I used a woman in my films or wrote a woman into my film, I wanted her to be a central point and a motivating point or a catalyst to function in the film.
When you manage to express something with a look and the music instead of saying it with words or having the character speak, I think it's a more complete work.
Charlie Chaplin, too, through spectacle, contraband certain ideas, put them through, ideas that even today are not being expressed by great statesmen and politicians.
I work with intuition. With interpreters. I have my own method. I know exactly what I want from actors. Sometimes, I even recite the role to the actor if it's not clear.
I've tried to consider stories that I have read, making them into films, but they would turn out unnatural. If a producer wants that, he should call other people. Not me.
When one goes to see Modern Times, for instance, one understands much more about socialism than listening to the man who was then head of the Socialist movement in Italy.
The important thing is to make a different world, to make a world that is not now. A real world, a genuine world, but one that allows myth to live. The myth is everything.
Probably the greatest writer of westerns himself was Homer. His character were never all good or all bad. They're half and half, these characters, as all human beings are.