John Boorman Quotations

I think that as a director you have to at the very least shape the script; structure it. Otherwise you're not really doing your job.

Before I start shooting I have all the actors know where we are going with every scene, what the intention is and where we are trying to get to.

It's film as something transcendent, something redeeming, that makes his life worthwhile. It's a tremendously life-affirming film. And yet it's about not making a film. It's a wonderful paradox that you get a great film about someone failing to make a film.

What we need is someone to abolish the House Of Lords, get rid of the Royal Family...

I love green. Green is the color of nature, trees. I'm a tree freak. I spend a lot of my time planting trees, nurturing them, and studying them. It's one of the colors I couldn't live without.

All art is fundamentally subversive, because it upsets people's perceptions, their notions about society. Therefore, art is dangerous, but good art is always making us reassess our thoughts and feelings about how we relate to other people. There are always people who fear that and want to suppress that.

It's so easy to manipulate an audience, but it's nearly always clear that you are being manipulated. I think even people that are not critically attuned are aware of cynical manipulation in film.

And you poor creatures--who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business, too?

Movie-making is the process of turning money into light. All they have at the end of the day is images flickering on a wall.

There are always forces at work in a society, which are really forces of censorship - either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film.

There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.

I'm trying to suggest a kind of Middle Earth, in Tolkien terms. It's a contiguous world; it's like ours but different.

I was in Japan, and my assistant director had worked with Kurosawa. I used quite of number of Kurosawa's crew.

The resistance to [black-and-white] is huge, in the way that you have to sell the film. It's difficult to distribute around the world.

When actors are being defensive and defending their position, that is when you get less than good acting.

I only storyboard scenes that require special effects, where it is necessary to communicate through pictures.

What is passion? Passion is surely the becoming of a person.

Up until the middle to late '60s, it was a choice to film in black-and-white or color. But then television became so vital to a film's finance, and television won't show black-and-white. So that killed it off, really.

Black and white is much closer to the condition of dreaming. It links you to the subconscious and I think that was part of the great appeal of movies originally.. this strange otherness.

The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead...

What is passion? It is surely the becoming of a person. Are we not, for most of our lives, marking time? Most of our being is at rest, unlived. In passion, the body and the spirit seek expression outside of self. Passion is all that is other from self. Sex is only interesting when it releases passion. The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead and that soon, come what may, we will be wholly so.

Black-and-white gives you that sort of parallel world. Also, it's very close to the condition of dreaming, to the unconscious.

I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.

All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived.

You can't get an actor to do something that is beyond his range, so you have to be aware of the range of the actor and, if necessary, alter the part to suit the actor.