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Quotes by Director

"While the eyes of the world will be on us let's show everyone that we have a great sense of humour."

"I worked at a local television station and I got a chance to direct and do all those things - worked kiddie shows, Ranger House show with the hand puppets and things like that."

"Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are."
Will,

"So I've had really great assistant directors for my last seven movies."

"All I know is that I operate by going out to each of them and trying to learn the territory in which they operate. My language to each of them has to suit their brain."

"What you do, is you gradually become more and more experienced, and more and more realistic about dramatic tolerance, i.e. about how long the play should be."

"Quite a few operas are still being commissioned around the world, although nothing apart from audience popularity can ensure more than a few performances."

"I've just been very, very lucky with the film having been introduced in the right way."

"I hope we're all kind of influencing each other now to keep the quality up on those things. They seem to be getting better and better and better as there's not only sort of a film geek audience, there's also a general interest in the overall film consuming population."

"Directing her was like directing Lassie. You need 14 takes to get each one of them right."

"I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge."

"Never in the history of cinema has a medium entertained an audience. It's what you do with the medium."

"Oh, yes, that never happened to me in my life before. It was a risky film, and I warned the producer."

"I allow a lot of room for improvisation and funny stuff. I always feel planned."

"I think that's the key to being a director: to be able to get the shot and move on quickly."

"I wouldn't say I'm a very controlling person. For instance, when I talk to the actors, I don't tell them exactly what I want because I want them to surprise me. I even encourage them to change some of the verses of the script if they need to."

"You are faced with the choice: either my integrity remains intact and this is the work that ends up on the screen, or I have to leave, and I have to be known to have left."

"Everybody has talent, it's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is."

"Consciousness is the glory of creation."

"It's easier for me to get three times the amount of money I really want."

"People tend to work in teams, in a collaborative way, in an informal network. If you create an environment like that, it's much more effective and much more efficient."

"I always think the Sex Pistols and the Ramones as very, very important because they stripped things down."
Sex,

"Ross Hunter was my assistant on Take Me to Town, He was a young man, an actor before that, and learned a lot on the picture. During shooting, Goldstein left, and Ross was most pleasant. He never interfered."

"Working on the themes I was interested in, through the context of a particular family, was a very economical way of dealing with a lot of the issues I was concerned with."

"It's a pity that I can never really enjoy my movies because, after the mixing, your capacity as a spectator just disappears. I have to think about what I felt just before the mixing."

"Egotism is not a good quality. It's not something to be admired or even tolerated. It wouldn't be tolerated in a field commander and it shouldn't be tolerated in a movie director."

"I was always into music. I think everyone is when they're a teenager, as a way to drown out the world."

"HERO is a combination of my personal feeling and the commercialism."

"Dali was the great painter then and surrealism was a way of life."

"I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different."

"And I liked this extreme character of de Sade."

"My father was an amateur filmmaker who shot 8mm color documentaries."

"It's always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone's seen the last one."
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