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Quotes by Director

"You go overseas and people are oppressed and scared and worried but we're not like that... we're more like my films and how people come out at the end of seeing them - they feel good."


"A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper."

"When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical."

"I honestly believe that the next big leap in immersive technology will be very much like Brainstorm."

"For me it's absolutely necessary to start from the very beginning. I can't think of coming and contributing something anywhere along the line other than the very start."

"It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman."


"At the first screening, there were a lot of areas that we went around and around about. Then we had our second screening. It played better. It's almost a reasonable length film now!"


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

"The commentary track became a lot like the movie and there are some funny, long, awkward pauses that you can tell we're just trying to find stuff to say. None of us had gotten to really talk about the movie until that moment and they were in New York and we were in L.A."

"If you want a midget to look like a baby, don't put a cigar in his mouth."

"He's very alive in a scene. He's a very good actor to act with. Even though through most of the picture he's blind, there are many places early in the picture I got to be with him before he was blind. Like convincing him in the office to do the picture."

"I really want to have actors contribute their own ideas, with phrasings and ideas on all levels."

"I brought in the stories many times. I don't just do animation."

"It was just the thrill of a lifetime. Brando and Hackman were two of my heroes."

"When we were trying to get the money for Driving Miss Daisy, everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen."

"I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience."

"I sought Ben Affleck because I needed an everyman for this role. Ben appeals to men and women. He gives you a sense of intelligence, the notion of a guy who can think on his feet."

"These are very subtle things, of course, and I don't expect everyone to pick them up consciously, but I think that there is something there that you must be able to feel, there is an energy at work that I must trust my audience will be able to pick up at some level."

"Oh yeah, I believe in God. I think there's much more evidence that there is a God than that there isn't. I don't believe that Mother Theresa and Hitler go to the same place."

"Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands."

"Some men are all right in their place if they only knew the right places."

"When a French book becomes an international hit it is because of the author and not because of the language. The same goes for movies."

"First of all, to defend my work, I had to believe that I am doing a totally silly, stupid, innocent comedy."

"I think there's an enormous value to being negative. The world we live in today, negativity is not permitted."

"If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrogance."

"At that point, the movie was called Wild Force. Everything fell apart, eventually - our financing completely fell apart - and we were never able to make that film."

"Symbolism perhaps is a bit in your face, and I've tried my best to control that as best I can as I've grown older and thought that one could approach something with a little more subtlety."

"I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design, which made sense because I could draw and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots."


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

"I have made a film about jazz that tries to look through jazz to see what it tells us about who we are as a people. I think that jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a kind of look into our redemptive future possibilities."

"What the Dalai Lama had to resolve was whether to stay in Tibet or leave. He wanted to stay, but staying would have meant the total destruction of Tibet, because he would have died and that would have ripped the heart out of his people."
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