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Quotes by Director

"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."

"I have no spy stories to tell, because I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between American and Russian national interest."

"Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, so we are no longer conscious of its presence."

"When quick results are imperative, the manipulation of the masses through symbols may be the only quick way of having a critical thing done."

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


"I think sport in general affects what people see in movies. I always try to explain to people in Hollywood that we have to make movies more like sport because, in sport, everything can happen and it's so much better than movies in some ways."

"I am not stopped by low funds, physical exhaustion, mental exhaustion, or temptations to stop and work on some other production that would be more financially rewarding."

"Character and emotionality don't always have to be relegated to quieter, more simple constructs."

"I was both very successful and very left; the living demonstration of how you could be on the left and still be in the gossip columns and be envied for the money you made."

"All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks."

"We always have a take that's 'one for fun', so once you've got what you need, you can do what you like. Something does occasionally pop out of that tree. I'm always open to ideas."

"The good thing from my perspective is that nobody puts any pressure on me to say what it's going to be. The backers accept that they don't know what they are going to get."

"Find your own specific voice in filmmaking and go for it. Either people will get it or they won't and that's what it's all about."


"I'd rather direct than produce. Any day. And twice on Sunday."

"If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life."


"We come from a tough, working class background, so we're very tight."

"The makers of entertainment must try, in our field, to be honest and grown-up."

"Yeah, I'm certainly a lot more confident on this one than I was one the last one, which I think can be a good thing and a bad thing. But, at least I slept while making this film."
Film,

"The difference between sex and love is that sex relieves tension and love causes it."

"I think people remember pictures not dialogue. That's why I like pictures."


"You know how you smoke out a sniper? You send a guy out in the open, and you see if he gets shot. They thought that one up at West Point."

"But I won't work with the exact same crew film after film because I feel the work would get a little complacent."


"Truly great actors carry their characters in silence with them. They communicate without words the relationships that predate the movie."

"I really think the biopic thing so rarely works, because people's lives don't have a dramatic shape that can be satisfying."

"If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."

"I became a loner. I became a mountain man. A lot of those things are very good qualities and they help you do your work, help you be singular and keep the artistic integrity of your work intact, but they don't make it very easy to live your life."

"I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I have looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life."


"Eventually, the tribe developed so much confidence in me that they invited me to be their chieftain."
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