Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies.
You can be moderate in a way and still intense in your views. It's the extremism that gets frightening; religious fundamentalism and wacko-left liberalism is crazy.
It doesn't matter what I'm doing - I wish it was something else. If I'm producing, I wish I was directing. If I'm directing, I wish I was doing almost anything else!
I mean, certainly writing, painting, photography, dance, architecture, there is an aspect of almost every art form that is useful and that merges into film in some way.
It's impossible for me to go into a room or look at a location without a part of my brain photographing it - picking the best angle or looking at the way the light hits.
I personally have never made a movie in Hollywood, because I don't want to get up in my own bed and then go to the movie set, and then come home at night to my real life.
I think a lot of creative people are uncomfortable with therapy. Because you're basically trying to 'solve' the unconscious. And the unconscious is where it all comes from.
It's a terrible mistake when it gets to be a contest of egos. The actor is always going to win. If a director gets into a control situation and is overbearing, it's deadly.
It would be a great vacation to act in a movie if I weren't directing it. But to do it while you're directing interferes with your concentration, and I wouldn't do that again.
Beginnings and endings are not interesting; audiences want the high point, which means you've got to get to it and get to it now - get the gun out fast, the clothes off quick.
Each time I make a movie, it's a little bit like taking another course in something because there's an argument between these people that I don't necessarily have an answer to.
I'm not going to be an interpreter at the U.N. I'm not going to live in Africa on a farm or whatever, but I am going to see the world through those eyes when I make those films.
We progress by leaps and bounds technologically, medically - we can live longer, we can... but you know, in the year 1230, they knew as much as we know now about the human heart.
Even in 'Victor/Victoria,' there was talk about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man. You didn't get that in the old days, in 'Charley's Aunt' or 'Some Like It Hot.'
I have one life. I am a certain age. I'm married to one person. I have a certain number of children. I won't have another life other than that, but I do have many lives through the films.
I don't consider myself a teacher of moral and political positions. I don't want to be that. I can't help but have a point of view when I make a film, but my first job is to entertain you.
There's a religious basis to their [Bush and Chaney] kind of conservatism. It's rooted in a kind of fundamentalism. I'm afraid of that. I don't like that idea. I think all extremism is suspect.
I learned everything, right or wrong, about honor and love, all those things, when I was a kid watching movies. I learned as much there as I did from my parents or my schooling or anything else.
I don't have a style. I've never thought of myself as a stylist like the visual stylists I admire enormously - Adrian Lyne, Ridley Scott, Alan Parker - in which every shot has a great idea in them.
I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.
Hollywood was set up by a bunch of businessmen. They do not see their job as being philanthropists. I don't think it's a contradiction in terms to attempt to be a good businessman and to also be liberal.
The terrible tragedy for every director is to watch an actor do what you want and not have the camera rolling - and never get it back again. So I always try to roll the camera before anybody's really ready.
I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.
I make films, and I hope that people come to see them. If they don't, I pay a big price. But I can't make decisions where I would change my own standards or my own taste in order to court the public in some way.
What makes architecture extraordinary is that you're looking at the building, but your peripheral vision is also seeing how it fits within a space. And it's seeing more than one part of the building at one time.
If you list the qualities that we consider feminine, they are patience, understanding, empathy, supportiveness, a desire to nurture. Our culture tells us those are feminine traits, but they're really just human.
My films ought to be judged on whether they're entertaining or good as films, but not on the political view necessarily. I'm trying to be morally responsible and no more. I don't have an agenda I'm trying to push.
Even if it's a thriller or a comedy, it's always a love story for me, and that's what I concentrate on, because the love stories are my surrogates for the argument: two people in conflict that see life differently.
Like a lot of New Yorkers, I assumed that I knew all about the U.N. I was shocked to find out it's not like anything I had in mind. There are only six languages accepted there. It's considered international territory.
At every premiere, I stand in the back, I never sit, worrying. And then maybe I hear them laugh or whatever, and the muscles unclench a little. But always, I feel like it's a fluke, that I'll never be able to do it again.
I will not ever say that it's good to start with too little preparation, because that's patently not true. But I don't rehearse the way a lot of directors do, to stage a scene in terms of manners and attitudes and lock them in.
This thing called chemistry, which I can't define and wouldn't know how to, either works or it doesn't. Sometimes a love story can involve very talented actors, but we are not invested emotionally in whether they end up together.
[Stanley] Kubrick was a fascinating, larger than life guy who had been a friend for many years prior to our working together on that film. I found the best part of working with him to be the long conversations we had between set-ups.
By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that's led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do.
Making a film is a way for me to understand what it's like to be a murderer, to confess, to be a beaten wife, to be a minority, to be a victor, to get the girl, to lose the girl. I can do all of that through the practice of an art form.
When you rehearse a play, you spend four weeks with one goal in mind - to wean the actor away from you. You want the actor to become completely independent and to understand all the emotional and psychological moves within the character.
There isn't any question that Hollywood is profit driven. Anybody that thinks it isn't is a fool. It's a business. Hollywood was never philanthropy. The only purpose it had was making money; the only purpose it still has is to make money.
When you spend your life acting and being other people, as opposed to being the one person that you are, you learn that life is gray sometimes, not black and white. That what you thought was true isn't necessarily true if you switch sides.
All films are political, whether they mean to be or not. Star Wars is political. As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics. It's just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others.
Every film I've made has a kind of frustrated love story in the center of it. They were people who saw life from opposing points of view, which has been in every film I've ever done. It had all the ingredients of the kinds of films I like to do.
I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.
Stars are like thoroughbreds. Yes, it's a little more dangerous with them. They are more temperamental. You have to be careful because you can be thrown. But when they do what they do best - whatever it is that's made them a star - it's really exciting.
I have to have a working knowledge of light, and optics, film emulsions and their properties, and lenses, otherwise I can't create the shoots that are the vocabulary of the films. But it is not necessary for me to be a cameraman, I can hire a cameraman.
I see my job as trying to entertain you, to be balanced in some way, and morally responsible. I don't want to glorify a killer. I don't want to glorify a rapist. I don't want to do those things, but on the other hand I don't want to lecture to you, either.
When you're shooting a feature that costs $200,000 a day with a crew of 250, you don't want accidents; you want to know exactly what's going to happen. But with a documentary, you don't, so you have to be sensitive to accidents because that is where the gold is.
For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don't know that George Washington would be a president today, I don't know that Abe Lincoln would, I don't know that Roosevelt would.
Relationship films are political. If a woman is sitting in a waiting room in an office and a man walks in and sits down, it's a political situation. If he decides to smoke, does he ask her or does he just light up? If he lights up, what does she do? It's politics.
With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.
If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture.
For reasons which I can't logically explain, in all of the films I've done, I've ended up doing love stories of one kind or another, and it seems to me that love stories are extremely dependent on the obstacles you can place between the lovers. There is no love story without it.