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Quotes by Director
"I like cappuccino, actually. But even a bad cup of coffee is better than no coffee at all."
148
"And also they were absolutely brilliant in one way, you know: they knew how effective is not to punish somebody who is guilty; what Communist Party members could afford to do was mind-boggling: they could do practically anything they wanted - steal, you know, lie, whatever."
83
"Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon."
78
"I wanted to be left alone to live my life, so it was very easy for people to pretend that they were me."
63
"Beside all this I think there was something personal, being Muslim myself who lived in the west I felt that it was my obligation my duty to tell the truth about Islam. It is a religion that has a 700 million following, yet it's so little known about it which surprised me."
62
"The children, each of those kids is in touch with nature and traditional aboriginal culture so a very important part of getting performances from them was just letting them be and trying to capture the unique spirituality that was in each of them."
62
"I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle."
61
"I'm not playing myself. It's a symbolic situation, where I want to introduce a fascist behind the table. I couldn't have had anybody else do that; for it to be successful, I had to do it myself."
60
"When I came out, and for many years afterwards, it had become a habit for me to sit and read and read and read, like an obsession. I would take 20 books, and not come out until I'd finished them. It took me a while to change that habit."
56
"Violence is one of the most fun things to watch."
54
"I've heard about brothers making films, but I've never heard about whole families making films like this. We didn't intend to do it; it wasn't something that we planned - it just gradually happened."
52
"It's not that we use technology, we live technology."
52
"I had an almost fetishistic attraction to film technology."
51
"Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second."
49
"Also, I knew that the impact of Motorcycle Diaries was going to be so resonant for all of us who went through the experience of making it that I didn't want to do anything that could reflect it."
48
"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."
Film,
47
"Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?"
47
"If I make two films in a year, they'll be different. This is my style - I can't have just one way."
46
"I do what I do because of Walt Disney - his films and his theme park and his characters and his joy in entertaining."
45
"The necessity to conceptualise has to come very early on, and defining a vector of development for that film also at the beginning of the process will allow you much more freedom as you go along."
44
"When I was in film school, it was said that all good films were characterised by some form of humour."
44
"Women today are dealing with both their independence and also the fact that their lives are built around finding and satisfying the romantic models we grew up with."
43
"Movies are usually difficult, often insane, constantly challenging and always strangely amusing to make."
39
"When we began filming, these people had legs, but as we were filming, they had been injured and they were brought to the hospital to have their legs amputated, and that's where we found them and asked them to come and be part of the film."
39
"I'm much more interested in living specific experiences in films."
39
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