Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My 40th birthday I held in an old-age home. My 50th I had at Pravda before it opened in New York. My 60th I had at Pastis. For my 70th, I thought, 'I don't need to have a celebrity party this year. I'm going to go take my oldest, closest friends to Paris.'
Indonesia can hold regular elections, but if the laws do not apply to the most powerful elements in society, then there is no rule of law and no genuine democracy. The country will never become a true democracy until it takes serious steps to end impunity.
I am crazy about my own films. The films I've just made I'm crazy about them. But then I don't see them for many years. It's like when you get a new child you're very crazy about this child but then after a few years you're like, "what was its name again?"
Everyone looks at our films and thinks that we are somehow able to make movie after movie that does well and is entertaining, but there's an enormous amount of work that goes on under the hood and an enormous number of mistakes that are made along the way.
Being a father at a later age is different from when I had my other two daughters when I was in my 20s and 30s. If you're in your 60s and you're with the kid every day, you're dealing with the mind of a child, so it opens up that childishness in you again.
If Ivan the Terrible had been kissed and loved between zero and three, he probably would have become Ivan Not So Terrible. If you're Jewish, you have a small smile on your face. Because you know the rest are wrong and you don't want to hurt their feelings.
Could I have worked under a system where there were Draconian controls on my creativity, meaning budget, time, script choices, etc.? Definitely not. I would have fared poorly under the old studio system that guys like Howard Hawks did so well in. I cannot.
Personally, I find looking at all of the supporting materials and bring it all back to me - the people I worked with, the experience of working on a project - makes it come alive again. So, I try to put those experiences into my commentary for the viewers.
When she saw my messy desk, she said she was the same way, and there was no dust on the TV, and I was easy to love. People just need a little help because they are so used to not loving. It's like scoring the clay to make another piece of clay stick to it.
National film industries tend to move in cycles. In Australia right now, we're on a high, a feeling of potential, which as yet shows no sign of flagging. But the word "industry" is misleading. A small national cinema has no industry in the Hollywood sense.
National film industries tend to move in cycles. In Australia right now, we're on a high, a feeling of potential, which as yet shows no sign of flagging. But the word 'industry' is misleading. A small national cinema has no industry in the Hollywood sense.
With everything I've done from "Jackie Brown" on, I got really into really writing more prose in the - in what you're calling the stage directions, all right, and consequently my scripts have gotten bigger and bigger, and cut to "Kill Bill Volume 1 and 2."
It's kinda like D.H. Lawrence had this idea of two people meeting on a road, and instead of just passing and glancing away, they decide to accept what he calls the confrontation between their souls. It's like freeing the brave, reckless gods within us all.
I'm not making a movie about the real people. I'm making a movie about what they did, and what happened to them. But I will create characters so that I can have the freedom to make them say and do what I want. The real-life journalists were fine with that.
There are a couple of things that are, in the present, floating in front of my face, and once one of them gets enough energy to become a voice that I cannot not hear, then I will become a steamroller. When you've made your film, you stop hearing the voice.
We're a strange animal, so often destroying what we love for selfish ends, and yet tantalized by the sense that there are other choices if only we had strength to make them. In the politics of 400 years ago, we find the same questions we battle with today.
I wanted to make mini features. And there was a wonderful creative freedom; not necessarily copying the lyrics, but just trying to create emotion. Like the songs, you know? Just like how the song creates an emotion, I wanted the video to create an emotion.
In film, you get to take your time and make it right. In TV, it's all about the schedule. The train is moving and you sometimes just don't have time to make things right, which is painful 'cause you know it could be done better and you just have no choice.
I often wonder when I make a film - I'm thinking of making a film of the Buddha - and I often wonder: If Buddha had all the elements that are given to a director - if he had music, if he had visuals, if he had a video camera - would we get Buddhism better?
I mean, I think there's a lot of hope in my work. I don't think I'm a total pessimist, so I think you can find hope in all my films. Some more than others, but there's definitely... I think we want to convey the feeling of hope with the montage at the end.
You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.
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 don’t have many friends and you don’t have a social life you’re kind of left looking at things, not doing things. There’s a weird freedom in not having people treat you like you’re part of society or where you have to fulfill social relationships.
Even if you're doing something that the studio sends you, or something that's based on a book or story, at the end of it all, you try to make whatever it is your own. This is based on my love of horror movies. Everything is based on something, in some way.
Also I've got to say in the movie ["300"] Gorgo, who is the Queen, she has also a part that is - I think - I don't want to say, 'Oh look, it's multi-quadrant,' and all this. I believe that it is because I think my dad can see this movie and go, 'F**k yeah!
You are always in the world. Even in Vagabond. I am not on the road, I am not eating nothing. But in a way we all have a Mona. We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road. In all women there is something in revolt that is not expressed.
When I was shooting the film I did not see the story as an everyday tale or a social one. To a great extent, the film is a mythological look on human life. This is probably what I would like the audience to keep in mind before they enter the screening room.
I had seen some films made about the underground music world in Tehran, and most of them were short documentaries about 30 or 40 minutes long. And I always wondered why they weren't publicized more. Really, their only flaw was they were short documentaries.
I am not interested in simply working as a director. If I am not making movies that I want to make, that I feel passionate about, or that I feel are hopefully at the level of cinematic quality that I feel they should be then I am not really that interested.
I don't really see a huge divide between filmmaking and television. In the end, a lot of people are going to be watching this stuff on their laptops and their iPhones anyway. So, it doesn't really matter where it comes from, as long as the stories get told.
I like to make films because I like to go into another world. I like to get lost in another world. And film to me is a magical medium that makes you dream... allows you to dream in the dark. It's just a fantastic thing, to get lost inside the world of film.
My movies are film-paintings - moving portraits captured on celluloid. I'll layer that with sound to create a unique mood -- like if the Mona Lisa opened her mouth, and there would be a wind, and she'd turn back and smile. It would be strange and beautiful.
When Peter Jackson made the 'Lord of the Rings' movies, I remember there was a concern that people who didn't read Tolkien wouldn't go see the first one. But the films were so good in their own right that the audience grew beyond the readership of the book.
My films, I've tried to put a message into them. It's not about the gore; it's not about the horror element that are in them. It's more about the message, for me. That's what it is, and I'm using this platform to be able to show my feelings of what I think.
It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life.
My goal is that after seeing 'Grand Canyon,' every person in the audience will go home knowing they have to conserve water: even something as simple as installing a low-flow toilet or showerhead, or turning off the faucet while they're brushing their teeth.
For any actor to have Oliver Stone call him or her up Its a compliment. He expects you to be on your toes. If youre not, he pokes at you until you react. Hes very provocative, creatively. It started like a lot of hard work, but it ended up a lot of fun.
After 'Bhaji On The Beach', I didn't make a movie for six years. I couldn't get a movie off the ground for love nor money. It was a very tough time and I almost gave up. If I had been an Oxbridge bloke after 'Bhaji', my career would have been very different
The more I make films, the more I feel less inclined to talk about them and just let people watch them. I feel that the pictures are telling the story, and I can't really add anything except just talking about the technicalities of what happened on the day.
The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it - I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics is hopeless.
The corporate system dictates what gets made, and the movies are so bad because of the economic structure of Hollywood. The big business takeover of Hollywood is at fault rather than American storytellers - it's what keeps textured movies from getting made.
When I hear the word independent I reach for my revolver. At this point, what the hell does that mean? The English Patient is an independent film... Hootie and the Blowfish are alternative music. I'm the Queen of Denmark. I don't know what it means anymore.
'Blue Velvet' changed my life forever. It was like I'd always read Chaucer and suddenly discovered Charles Bukowski. It made me understand that there is poetry of sublime ecstasy and dark terror, and it spoke to a side of me that hadn't been reached before.
Film has become a very passive experience, but with theatre, there is a contract made with the audience, where they participate. That's why my parents' puppet theatre was such a special place - people used their imaginations. It's a muscle that needs using.
I grew up in Los Angeles, and I've made movies all over the world... I've been in New York, Norway, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, London - I've been in all these cities, shooting away in the winter, thinking, 'People who choose to live here are insane.
There are very few distributors left to do off-Hollywood movies, and those distributors generally have got thousands of movies to choose from. So you're pretty lucky if you get one to even take your movie and it's pretty rare that they pay anything upfront.
I would never want to live anywhere but Baltimore. You can look far and wide, but you'll never discover a stranger city with such extreme style. It's as if every eccentric in the South decided to move north, ran out of gas in Baltimore, and decided to stay.
It's a world creation show [Shadowhunters], so we've gotta work hard in the physical production capacity with the visual effects, the sets and everything. It's not just the real world with two people chatting in a diner. That's tough on a television budget.
We have to start processing what we're really made of in America. American character is not dead. American integrity and honesty are not dead. When we're backed up against the wall against the largest corporations in the history of corporations, it's there.
'Memorial Day' is about 'spring break' girls-gone-wild culture which is the seedy underbelly of our American Puritanism, the inverse side of the coin. It's also about how we forcefully exported that culture and then pretended to not know what we were doing.