Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Casting is always subject to availabilities.
I never write with particular actors in mind.
I sound like Warhol but only because I'm tired.
You never know what people are going to go and see.
Casting is all about availability, as much as anything else.
The only answer to "Are you Beatles or Stones?" is, "I'm both."
I'm not very precious at all, which I think people find surprising.
I think probably everybody works most on the beginning and the ending.
You don't write for actors. Actors come for characters you've made up.
If you see, as I do, in edited film, you're going to end up as a director.
For some reason, I seem to work well with actors. I love working with them.
In all honesty a gangster picture was the easiest kind of film for me to get made.
Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.
I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.
Look at what people are trying to conceal, and you’ll see that they’re revealing everything.
Whatever you cut when there's no deadline isn't really a cut. You're just pushing colors around.
It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.
I love editorial and sound and music, and I was working with the best people, so you learn a lot.
I write drama in the English language. If I wasn't working in London I'd be doing something wrong.
I don't like scripts leaking. On the other hand, the more real attention a script gets, the better.
Wisdom is not having illusions, especially anything in your own mind that elevates you above others.
I never viewed screen drama as a vulgar form, or a lesser one, and I've never written it left-handed.
I'm a homebody, as many writers are, and need to be by myself, and I like to be by the Atlantic Ocean.
London matters to me because it's the center of what I do for a living and has been since Tudor times.
If you decide to do Hamlet in a funny hat staged in a ruined factory, it doesn't make you Shakespeare.
Most films go out like skydivers who have had their chutes packed by a committee of blind schizophrenics.
As a director, you're given a tremendous apparatus to work with, and very great talents are available to you.
Without English art, I never would have understood myself, my own family, or the New England world I lived in.
When I'm shooting, as much as writing, I see edited footage in my mind, so I work that way, and it's economical.
I'd been working so hard making the film that I hadn't even emotionally processed the fact that I was a director.
I learned my job from English dramatists. Tennessee Williams was no good for me, New York stuff was no good to me.
It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.
When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.
Out of all of the Star Trek movies, I happen to like the most recent one the best. I think it was the best one ever done.
Get Carter is a classic, but it did nothing in the United States. It came out on a double bill with a Frank Sinatra western.
My gratitude to Ridley [Scott] isn't anything new. I named one of my kids after him. But he's a very important person to me.
On historical you take the known facts, dramatize them, and then stitch them together by invention. It's a projective thing.
The old days of screenwriting, and myths about screenwriting, are maybe over. It's a literary form, if you can wake up to it.
The thing about movies is if somebody has an idea that works, it's in, and I say that as a screenwriter as well as a director.
I don't think the latest Star Wars pictures have any artistic intentions, but the original picture opened up epic science fiction.
I'm not a precious text protector, or anything like that, you know, because it's a much more vital form than that. You have to rock.
Refreshing honesty has been getting me in trouble since I was five, but it's probably had some positive effects - like not being a liar.
I think that gambling is a synthetic experience and that if you have any balls you gamble with your life. I have. So can everybody else.
You know a shooter when you see it. At least the creative people do. If a picture isn't obvious in the first draft you're kind of screwed.
You evolve in the ways in which you are precious. When you are the director, you are also continuing to write on the floor as you go along.
If you write a screenplay that gets circulated, you have a bigger readership than any literary novelist. And it's an educated audience as well.
I never work until I have a deadline. You have to fit so much in a given day that you just don't get serious until you know when the deadline is.
Saying directors don't write because they don't type is very wrong, it's like saying Dylan doesn't write music because he doesn't write notation.
You just have to know what you want and what you're doing and it leads to a kind of general well-being, which I think you sensed when you were there.
I was particularly anxious that I shoot the tires out of the class system. All it is these days is a hobby of certain masochists, and certain sadists.