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Quotes by Director

"If one sees the American Nightmare first and Chainsaw after that, you'll see it in a different kind of light."

"I don't remember anything anybody said in any Jack Ford picture. Nothing happens except action."

"I've worked with an awful lot of people. Katy Hepburn, Spencer Tracy."


"You're talking to somebody who two years ago couldn't figure out how to use e-mail and who now has carpal tunnel. It has totally changed in that these films would not be getting out to people the way they're getting out without the Internet."

"Sergio Leone was a big influence on me because of the spaghetti westerns."

"After the enormous success of All About my Mother, all the awards and everything, I wanted to start a movie in exactly the same place that I used to be before. I wanted to show that all of the success had not changed my perception."

"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."

"I didn't go to classes there, but ended up at the Cinematheque, and there it opened up even wider because there I saw a variety of films from all over the world."

"All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it."

"I've never made any effort to hide what happened. I served my time, I've tried to learn and move on."

"What I love about new technology is that it really pushes the art. It really pushes it in a way that you can't imagine until you come up with the idea. It's idea-based. You can do anything."

"I will not cut my film because, because, because, because of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz."

"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."

"I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten."

"You know, I find it very strange when movies that I made that were just excoriated - I mean that I was just vilified for - are now looked at as classics."

"I've never felt that using something with tongue in cheek has been a bad thing."

"For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake."

"It's kind of interesting to be a director who is all of a sudden being an actor playing an agent. This is my whole world!"

"When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War."

"Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night."

"All my movies are difficult to classify because they are very eclectic in mixing genres."

"Frankly, despite my horror of the press, I'd love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers."

"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."

"I remembered the 500 people that lived on a reserve outside my little town, behind a big fence."

"Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also."
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