Bruce Beresford Quotations

There's a bright spot in every dark cloud.

It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.

In Australia, they set up a special fund to kick films off. It was quite an enlightened sort of move. You could go to this government bureau with scripts and and get finance for films.

With Cold Sassy Tree having its first production, I saw no necessity to do anything other than produce it with the correct setting.

When we were trying to get the money for Driving Miss Daisy, everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen.

Everyone has seen photographs of Mexicans wearing those big sombreros. When you come to Mexico, the astonishing thing is, nobody wears these hats at all.

Film is shot in fragments, and the same moments can be shot again and again until the director is satisfied.

It's not enough to hit the notes. There is no point in the singers just standing there and sounding wonderful if they're not connecting with the characters they are portraying.

The music of the most popular operas is so highly esteemed, it can stand endless revivals.

When I was 24 I went to Nigeria and it was such a culture shock, growing up in Australia and suddenly being the only white man in this unit full of black men.

At HBO, they seem to be well-informed. They make what I think are really quite mature films.

The number of opera houses around the world and the high attendance rates show that opera an art form that is more popular than ever.

Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama.

For a director, the most challenging scenes are the dialogue scenes.

He's wrong. That's why his films look so terrible.

I didn't get upset because I wasn't nominated, but I was a little surprised.

I'd really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

In my view, the operas of Carlisle Floyd will find a place in the permanent repertoire.

On stage, the audience watches from a fixed viewpoint and the director cannot retake something he doesn't like. It has to work straight through.

When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.

With a film, I do my best to understand the author's intentions and try to bring the characters to life.

Tender Mercies is a very low-budget film, but it was a huge budget compared to anything I had done in Australia. My fee for Tender Mercies was something like five times all of my Australian films combined.

In opera, everyone's watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn't relate too much to film.

In silent movies, they tended to put the camera down, and everybody walked in front of it and acted, and then they all walked off. Cutting was quite infrequent.

Quite a few operas are still being commissioned around the world, although nothing apart from audience popularity can ensure more than a few performances.

I don't rehearse films as much as opera or theatre. When I began directing films I thought a long rehearsal was a good idea. Experience showed me that the best performance was often left in a rehearsal room.

There were movies that always made me want to be a director. You see brilliant scenes and the way the emotions were handled. I thought, I'd really like to do that.

There are some good writer/directors in the U.S. as well. In general the writing and directing tend to be separated but I bet that most of the directors have a big effect on the scripts. These days the studios tend to bring in hordes of writers.

When we were trying to get the money together for the film, one reason that was consistently given for not investing in it was that everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen.

Perhaps the most difficult thing is shooting scenes set 6,000 feet up in the mountains of Mexico.

I thought, This is fabulous. It sent shivers up my spine. I thought, What kinds of people are these that would produce this kind of music in a camp? All the prison camp stories I've seen, and heard of, were about the heroism of men. As I researched this and heard the music, I realized that women were heroic too, on just as grand a scale. And their treatment was just as appalling.

So I said to the production company, 'what are we going to Canada for if we're not going to use local actors?' And they said to me - and this was something that I was unaware of - 'the accent is different.' And I said, being from Australia, 'what a load of nonsense.' But after I had been here for a few weeks I realized that this was indeed true, the accent is different.

My feeling is that while we are constructing a show you need not be a boxing fan to enjoy, it will reintroduce millions of people to boxing,

I think casting is important because if you get the right actors cast then you appear to be a much better director than you are because then it goes very smoothly. But if you make a mistake in the casting and you want a performance that is somewhat different to what they want to do, it's going to be very difficult.

I said we should really use an unknown in King David because any actor that you use for such a famous figure, you're going to get a laugh.

Well, I storyboard the films from every shot and from every angle. I specify to the cameraman where the camera should be and what lens he should use and then I work out all the moves for the actors. Of course this can change, but I would have to say that 95% of the time the film is done exactly the way I have storyboarded it.

We had a lot of trouble with that third role because I said to the studio that it was important to get someone who was, on the one hand, a wonderful actor, and, on the other hand was not well known, because if you had simply hired an actor like one of the Baldwin brothers or someone like that the audience would have known that they were too big a star to be killed off and not come back.

Perhaps the most difficult thing is shooting scenes set 6,000 feet up in the mountains of Mexico.

Antonio is very focused, very well-prepared, he has thought about it a lot, read about it a lot. And he is a very agreeable sort of guy to work with.

I have some director friends who have said that they don't really like working with actors - directors who have said 'I wish they would just get on with it. I don't want to talk to them,' which always struck me as strange because I certainly like talking to actors and I have spent a long time casting them.

I have written a lot of films that didn't get made for one reason or another and I have one called The Women in Black that I hope will get made next year. And there were others that got made that I wrote under different names, I always think that better directors write the scripts because if you can't write, and you don't have anything to say, then what's the point of making films?