American Director Quotations | Page 5

The greatest nations have all acted like gangsters and the smallest like prostitutes.

You want to keep it fresh and you hopefully can keep doing new stuff that's going to continue to stimulate and keep people interested.

And it was out in the theaters in two weeks. This is not, 'We're going to develop twenty-five and maybe one's going to get made,' so the first three things I wrote got up on the screen and, good, bad or indifferent, I got to see them on their feet.

And is there a movie, whatever the genre here, that I would like to go see? If I can see the germ of that there, I'll usually take the job.

And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.

The county was also organized in New England, but took on chiefly judicial and military functions, and speedily abandoned local administration.

The first thing is that we're being attacked by both the Writers Guild and the Producers Guild. Both of these groups are trying to diminish the importance and strength of the director. They're trying to do it through both frontal and side attacks.

The first assistant director runs the set. The whole mood of the movie, the whole tenor of the set comes off that person, and it's just a critical choice.

The directors I would have loved to have seen were Kurosawa or Leone - I would have loved being on their set to see how they worked.

The director is the teller of the film, the director tells the movie, like you would tell a story, except in this case you're telling a movie.

A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit.

And - but when you're making a film on somebody, you really have to check with them, and plan, and hire the cinematographer to come out.

The Lethals were never done as a special edition, but that's still a few years away. I'd love to do director's cuts of all four of them.

The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.