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Quotes by Director
"When I worked on 2001 - which was my first feature film - I was deeply and permanently affected by the notion that a movie could be like a first-person experience."
39
"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."
39
"I'd rather direct than produce. Any day. And twice on Sunday."
39
"Not a single person I named hadn't already been named at least a half-dozen times and wasn't already on he blacklist."
39
"If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life."
39
"I was an actor... or, at least, I was trying to be an actor."
39
"We come from a tough, working class background, so we're very tight."
39
"Whereas European films have traditionally been able to go into adult relationships. I think there's a huge audience in America for those kinds of films."
39
"Take the hardcore gamers. The characters are way more real in the world of hardcore gamers who have played the game for hundreds of hours. They have the movie in their heads, they've built it on their own. These guys are always very disappointed in the movies."
39
"I think experience will teach you a combination of liberalism and conservatism. We have to be progressive and at the same time we have to retain values. We have to hold onto the past as we explore the future."
39
"In discussing the process with the actors, I made it clear to them that they could improvise but that the sum total of their improvisation needed to impart certain plot points, and schematic material."
39
"You cannot limit yourself to one area of specialized craft. Instead, regardless of craft, you have to charge all forms of expression that lead to the community, to other people, with meaning."
39
"I long for the days when grosses were not even known. There was no weekend competition."
38
"So our films had a lot more to them than entertainment value, and I'm glad that a lot of people recognize that now. People realize now the value of them as educational."
38
"Forty years ago this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again - and if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I've done some damn good here!"
38
"Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs."
38
"In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets."
38
"I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew."
38
"Sweetheart, I'm the biggest ripped-off cartoonist in the history of the world, and that's all I'm going to say."
38
"Politics is very interesting and always leads to conflict."
38
"There is a certain moment in the film when the son is in the nursing home and he goes to the television and turns it off because he sees himself in the image."
38
"Anyone can negatively criticize - it is the cheapest of all comment because it requires not a modicum of the effort that suggestion requires."
38
"Well, you know the old line - to be nominated is what it's all about. I think that I've done pretty well - I've had about 46, or 47 nominations from my movies, and my films have won about 12 awards in total, so I don't really have any complaints."
38
"No, you're either born a writer, a storyteller, or you're not."
38
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