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Quotes by Director

"I think that finding a way into somebody's life that's sort of off from a side angle can tell you more about that person than a greatest hits approach."
Life,

"Apparently nobody really read it, it was a cheap movie, it fit their schedule in terms of things so fine, let the guy make that high school comedy. I used to work with Mel Brooks so they figured oh it's going to be one of those really silly movies and that's how it got made."

"I've lost many of my best friends... I'm going to satisfy myself now, not the critics, not even my friends."

"The best way to turn a woman's head is to tell her she has a beautiful profile."

"When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it."

"Well, all these stars have their houses swept quite regularly by people who work in the surveillance security business. They come in and they look for bugs and things."

"The informing idea of what you want to say and do, that's what will take you from film school to professional - the idea. That's what is original to you."

"I have a problem when people say something's real or not real, or normal or abnormal. The meaning of those words for me is very personal and subjective. I've always been confused and never had a clearcut understanding of the meaning of those kinds of words."

"More personal films, you could make them, but your budgets would be cut down."

"As a producer, I think one of the most important decisions you make is not necessarily the material you are working on but the production apparatus that you choose to develop the project with, and that determines what funding you go to, it determines many factors."

"There's one thing better than having a great actor, and that's having a great actor who's never done this kind of role before and is hungry to do it. They're testing themselves every day. They want to get out of their trailer and get to work."

"When you make a film like this, you must have the highest expectations of your audience. Having worked in situations where we have the lowest expectations of our audience."

"Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature."

"The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have, instead of what you don't have."

"I felt that the Star Wars series became very pretentious as time went on. Just heavy and leaden."
Time,

"I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories."

"The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it."

"Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be."

"The cultivation of sensibility on purely personal lines may, in fact, be the very worst training for a world where only the corporate and the cooperative will matter."

"There's a monster outside my room, can I have a glass of water?"

"I think that the consciousness of passion makes you act very differently."

"In Finland, getting a university degree is the first thing that you expect your kids to do."

"When we did Wayne's World, it was 14 million dollars and they didn't bug us too much because they just thought it was some little movie that nobody was ever going to see. We showed them."
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