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Quotes by Director


"I try to address my audiences intelligently. The man in the street counts, but sometimes he forgets that he counts."

"A film that is bleached tends to have a more realistic quality."

"For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic."

"You program music with an image and then people are desensitized."

"You have to edit the material. That assumes that some kind of a mind is operating in relation to the material. Not all minds are the same. Every aspect of filmmaking requires choice. The selection of the subject, the shooting, editing and length are all aspects of choice."

"There is a certain kind of respect for authenticity today that there wasn't back in the days when they did 'Cleopatra,' where everything looked like a giant motel. People want to have it be authentic in the look, and authentic in the way people behave."

"The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time."

"But when I direct I become possessed, a possession I've never quite understood."

"Personally I am very much against the death penalty for several reasons."

"Why if I had half a chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage. The story opens on these mysterious explosions. Nobody knows what's causing them, but it's upsetting all the buffalo. So, the military are called in to solve the mystery."

"There's a consistency in my work that pops up independent of the limitations of the technology."

"I long for the days when grosses were not even known. There was no weekend competition."

"A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published."

"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."

"We are creating a fabulous franchise with an incredible female action hero."

"Yes, but I think if you look at it with a sort of gay sensibility and want everything to be positive about gay life, it could be interpreted as antigay."

"I did honest television. Real, live, honest television. That's what I did best."

"I hate Shakespeare. I think Shakespeare's rubbish."


"It's hard to blame someone because they simply don't have time."

"It's been my experience that every time I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else."

"It's useless to try and make rhyme or reason of it, because one guy thinks one thing and the other guy sees a whole other thing. So I try not to take them too seriously. Lately I have them screened so I only read the positive ones."
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