American Director Quotations

My ideas are always better. We have an understanding in place.

I felt that as long as we were being honest, and that we didn't bend the truth to accomplish another goal, to be entertaining or to be a happy ending, I was confident that we'd be able to tell the story the way it happened.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

I wanted to be a director and producer and writer, but in the early '40's the union wouldn't let you get through the gates. You couldn't get on a crew, or even learn to direct.

To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but, with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.

France is the country where the money falls apart and you can't tear the toilet paper.

There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.

When I got lucky with Dean, I ended up with 16 years with one of the truly great performers of all time. He was the greatest performer I'd ever been around, bar none.

We shot ten minutes of the movie, and now we're looking for completion funds.

I've had 79 to 80 years of show business. I started when I was 5 with a man called Tom Mix. I didn't have time to go to school because I was in silent movies, I was in radio, I was in burlesque, I worked with the circus. I'm all show business!

If two men on a job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, then both are useless.

Well, there are conjoined twins in real life and we can tell a story about them so long as they're not the brunt of the jokes. In this, they're the heroes of this story; we love these guys.

I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing; people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.

Nothing is more fallacious than wealth. It is a hostile comrade, a domestic enemy.

With a genre like film noir, everyone has these assumptions and expectations. And once all of those things are in place, that's when you can really start to twist it about and mess around with it.

No one is out to get you. It's just that... people are monkeys.

It is our art that has an opportunity to leave a footprint in the sand. They don't wrap fish in our work.

I was doing acting work at Fox - bit pieces with Greg Peck in The Gunfighter and things like that - and grew up more or less as a Fox contract player in about two years.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel pressed and tense almost every day of my life about something or other. And I think it's the one thing, as I look into people's eyes, that I think I share with almost everybody.

In the back of your mind, when you say you want to write music for the movies, you're saying that you want a big house, a big car and a boat. If you just wanted to write music, you could live in Kansas and do it.

I did honest television. Real, live, honest television. That's what I did best.

When you worked in a studio it was the studio system that you kind of missed because it was a big, big family. I mean MGM had 5,000 people working a day there. You miss it.

If you don't have a leg to stand on, you can't put your foot down.

What we call 'evil' doesn't necessarily deserve any kind of respect or understanding, by any means; it just deserves an acknowledgement of its complexity so we can better understand it - so we can help prevent it.

Well it was sent to me, well because almost everything that is written in Baltimore is sent to me. And David Simon, who was a writer for the Baltimore Sun, spent one year following the homicide squad in Baltimore and he chronicled that period of time.

I guess it beats throwing trash for a living.

Richard Donner is one of the few directors in Hollywood that can make whatever movie he wants exactly the way he wants it. No one will stop him.

The key is, if you're not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.

The permanent power brokers of this city are the columnists.

I guess I never had a better experience than working on The Long Riders, and at the same time, I never had a harder time than what I did making Southern Comfort.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

It's been my experience that every time I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else.

When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.

Really? Worst film you ever saw. Well, my next one will be better. Hello. Hello.

Once I make a picture, I never look at it again.

The colonies had little occasion to feel or to resent direct royal prerogative.

The only thing we don't do together is get in front of an actor and show any indecision at all about what we think. We don't always agree, so we meet privately, then one or the other will approach the actor.

Similarly, the Marquis is presented in this film as someone who would disturb the status quo and therefore must be kept imprisoned.

You love all your characters, even the ridiculous ones. You have to on some level; they're your weird creations in some kind of way. I don't even know how you approach the process of conceiving the characters if in a sense you hated them. It's just absurd.

Men have the power of thinking that they may avoid sin.

We're both very very lazy, and having someone else do half the work is very convenient.

Washington is the only city in the world where you can go to a black-tie dinner and there at the foot of the table is a television set up to catch a press conference.

It's eighty percent script and twenty percent you get great actors. There's nothing else to it.

I think it's fair to say I've always been a boxing fan.

It's a terrible thing to say I know. I've only done what I wanted to do. It's a real luxury. I only made the pictures I wanted to make and lived in the places I've wanted to live. I'm very, very happy.

I know people watch our movies and they'll see a lot of images - they call it gross-out - that they don't like, and I understand that. It's an important movie and one that's extremely well done, but the amount of violent imagery was not for me.

We create monsters and then we can't control them.

We thought we'd write a good script for women, giving them the fun roles that generally men get.

I read The Odyssey all the time. I always get something out of it.

And then we watched an amazing number of movies from the late '60s and '70s, which is my favorite time, and we studied their camera movements, their stocks, the way they lit stuff, the colors they used.

And it's a question of how far we're willing to go in order to let the ego shine, in order to let that beacon penetrate not only the local scene but the world.

I hope that not only my documentaries, but everybody's documentaries, last. It will really confuse historians in the next century, because they'll have, in addition to all the print material, they'll have all these pictures to look at.

Technical skill counts for nothing if it is used only to manufacture films which have little to do with humanity.

Apparently nobody really read it, it was a cheap movie, it fit their schedule in terms of things so fine, let the guy make that high school comedy. I used to work with Mel Brooks so they figured oh it's going to be one of those really silly movies and that's how it got made.

I guess there's a certain amount of poking fun at certain characters, but that's because there is something amusing about them or about the way they behave, so I guess you can say that that's poking fun at the character. But the character is your own invention, so who cares?

I mean, Joel talks to the actors more than I do and I probably do production stuff a little more than he does.

The highest point of philosophy is to be both wise and simple; this is the angelic life.

There's a science fiction project we really want to make, but it's very expensive. Hopefully it will happen.

Get Miramax to send me down to Australia. I'd like to see it.

There are some movies I can watch over and over, never get sick of. I'll put one of those on and be puttering around the house. Then a certain scene will come on and I'll just have to go over and watch.

I reckon this could mean another 10 million at the box office.

If anything, if you can get somebody interested in something and get them excited, that's great. You should be praised for having opened the debate and having asked the right questions.

Why if I had half a chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage. The story opens on these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what's causing them, but it's upsetting all the buffalo. So, the military are called in to solve the mystery.

My advice to young film-makers is this: don't follow trends, start them!

What's a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.

It's those moments, those odd moments that you look for and sometimes by creating this kind of loose atmosphere you find those little moments that somehow mean a lot to an audience when they really register right.

The point at which we worked with some of these actors, they weren't really stars yet. Nicolas Cage was not a big star when we did Raising Arizona. A lot of these people were also virtually unknown, too, when we worked with them first.

We've always loved going to the movies. Our mom and dad are big movie fans. They'd take us on these movie orgys where we'd see sometimes three movies in a day.

No one can harm the man who does himself no wrong.

We really want to see how the idea of an intellectual action movie is received by the world.

I think, on a larger note, that filmmakers and studios should start to tuck it in a little bit, because films wouldn't have the pressure they have if the word wasn't out about how expensive they were.

I always say the next one is my favorite.

The film's dramatic requirements should always take precedence over the mere aesthetics of editing.

You just have to trust your instincts and hope that if someone doesn't like your idea, you can prove them wrong in the final process. In the end, you can please some of the people some of the time, but that's about all you can do.

The story is also about the battle between Arthur and the Saxons. The Saxons were destroying everything they came across and Arthur was left when Rome was falling because this movie takes place in 400 A.D.

We want the best actor, and that's why Matt Damon worked so well in this role, because he's a great actor.

That's a little homage in a way to that and also to create that sort of creepy atmosphere that Hitchcock did. Vertigo was one of his great movies that was shot right here in The City and it's about a woman and the psychological twists and so forth.

We haven't had to defend anything to anybody.

I don't know why directors sign on to these projects and completely rewrite everything.

The only reason for using another cut is to improve the scene.

This one, even though it called for San Francisco, I think they wanted to initially shoot part of the film up here, you know get the exteriors and then go back to L.A. We really fought to get it up here and I think Paramount was really pleased.

We have an uncanny ability to make birds do what we want them to do. In Blood Simple there's a shot from the bumper of a car and it's going up this road and a huge flock of birds takes off at the perfect moment.

The divine law indeed has excluded women from this ministry, but they endeavour to thrust themselves into it; and since they can effect nothing of themselves, they do all through the agency of others.

The urge to purge the material I come up with is, I guess, an ongoing process.

Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.

It's... a hard thing for a director, to think you came up with a shot, something from your mind, and someone died while doing it. It's the worst thing you'll ever have to live with. It was very hard for me to get back on the horse again.

I don't know when the Return of the Living Dead are happening. That's been on the Internet for years.

It's not a monster movie. It's a supernatural thriller.

And I don't think I'm giving away any secrets here, but there are a lot of terrible scripts in this town.

But I like to go to movies with my son because it's still fun; it reminds me of why I make movies.

Now having said that, I realize that releasing a film in the real world is like trying to get General Motors to release a handmade car.

If the material is challenging, it forces you to challenge yourself when handling it.

We wouldn't have done it if we didn't think we could have fun with it.

Riches are not forbidden, but the pride of them is.

If audiences are sort of interested in movies that are made like McDonald's hamburgers, which do have a value in the world, then we have to re-evaluate our entire career.

I'm thinking, this is Robert Redford. You know, he's won an Academy Award, he's talking to me about directing a movie he's in. So you just think that it's Hollywood stuff or whatever.

I still think like a critic, and I still analyze films like a critic. However, it's not possible to write criticism if you're making films.

People that have been interested in our work for awhile... those are the last people you want to disappoint.

Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why: drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

Billy Wilder is really is a heavy influence on Bound. We felt that film noir was a genre where you could create a really contained story. We wanted to be on a set as much as we could to get the kind of style level we were looking for.