Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
No country could claim to be civilized if its legal system weren't available to everyone in it.
Reading a novel of a private experience, very, very different, the nature of it is very different.
You're fighting a losing battle if you expect the people who own the studios to make moral choices.
There isn't a studio in the world that wouldn't burn half its soundstages to get a Tom Cruise movie.
You don't normally do another presentation of All About Eve. You do one All About Eve, and that's it.
All the movies I've made are essentially character-driven movies about people that I'm interested in.
Good actors aren't enough. You need charisma. Can you imagine 'Casablanca' without Bogart and Bergman?
You hope that the responsibility of making movies will fall into the hands of essentially moral people.
We talked about Tootsie, the idea in Tootsie is that a man becomes a better man for having been a woman.
I'm not a very good predictor in any area of art, particularly my own. I don't know how to evaluate that.
OK, I know this is going to disgust you, Michael, but a lot of people are in this business to make money.
What I really want to do is produce. There isn’t much patience with a slow developing story line anymore.
It's always interesting to play people different from yourself, it would be boring for me to play myself.
I don't know what the creative process is. I don't know how to trick it into starting or how to egg it on.
I tend to be what I would call more progressive than conservative, but I think either extreme is excessive.
I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it's pretty hard to pick favorites.
I didn't grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.
I always go for the craft first because, to me, that's like an oil well - you either hit the oil or you don't.
Well, there's no question that a good script is an absolutely essential, maybe the essential thing for a movie.
There will be people who are sensitive about seeing the American point of view presented as less than sympathetic.
But, I've made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.
One wants to be able to experience being other people, remaking a reality, remaking a life, remaking a certain world.
It's my job to motivate the audience to believe. I have to get them to suspend their judgment in favor of involvement.
And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.
American movies are the most popular movies everywhere, and it is true that the quality is far from uniformly terrific.
I guess all my films are about resolving conflicts - and they're all love stories. If they weren't, I couldn't make them.
Before I saw 'Tootsie' with an audience, I thought, 'No one is going to believe this could convince anyone he's a woman.'
When you work without a script, you are in a sense working in a much more improvisational way than when you are prepared totally.
I knew I wasn't going to be any great shakes as an actor - the way I looked, I would play the soda jerk or the friend of a friend.
I do not have a good control of running sight gags. I laugh like hell when I see them, but I don't know how to invent those jokes.
You mustn't regret decisions that you make. Because the decisions are made out of your gut in a way and you have to stick with them.
The problem with filming something is that we struggle desperately to make three dimensions out of two dimensions. It can't be done.
Every time I am directing, I question why in God's name I'm doing it again. It's like hitting yourself in the forehead with a hammer.
I like thrillers a lot. There's a lot of discipline connected to them. You can't be as freewheeling as you are with character pieces.
You know, essentially when you do a play you're reinterpreting a work of art that already exists. That's not what happens with a movie.
Making films is much more difficult than people imagine, and so the experience of actually directing them is not one I've ever relished.
I'm as much a victim of the romantic myth of 'getting away' as anyone else. My head tells me it's myth, but I don't want to believe it is.
Most human beings who are accustomed to attempting to see the world from various points of view tend to be more liberal than conservative.
I mean, the truth of the matter is, I like the failures as much as I like the successes, it's only the world that doesn't like the failures.
Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they're sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.
The dance that happens, between actor and director, is a very delicate thing...it's why people tend to work together on many films over and over.
I do have a responsibility, but I would make the most boring films in the world if I woke up every morning worrying about my social responsibility.
By the time I'm done with a project, it's taken so long that I usually don't even like it anymore. I only see the things I wish I'd done differently.
What's overwhelmingly clear is 'Havana' didn't work for people, but why it didn't work I don't feel I can put my finger on in a way I can learn from.
Even with 'Three Days of the Condor,' I wanted to do a thriller. But I was still concentrating on the Faye Dunaway-Robert Redford relationship in that film.
At some point during the filmmaking process, you lose objectivity, and you need the eyes of someone who understands the process and has been in the trenches.
I've always thought of Denys Finch Hatton as a combination of Hubbell Gardner from 'The Way We Were' and Jeremiah Johnson. He is this ultimate individualist.
I'd get bored if I... if I had to do a movie, and there was no love story in it, I would just be bored. I mean, I would do it, but it would be kind of boring.
People aren't interested in paying $10 or $12 to go to the movies and to be lectured to politically. I'm not either. So I don't try to make those kinds of films.
I don't know about liberal bias, but people of a liberal mentality are probably attracted in greater numbers to the arts than people of a conservative mentality.