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Quotes by Director

"Some colors are very difficult to render, and you must compensate to get the color you want on the screen."

"I lost a year or two in there, trying to get films financed that I didn't know would never get financing."

"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."


"There's a saying among prospectors: 'Go out looking for one thing, and that's all you'll ever find.'"


"Here's to five miserable months on the wagon and the irreparable harm that it's caused me."

"A style is not a matter of camera angles or fancy footwork, it's an expression, an accurate expression of your particular opinion."

"Listen, if there's one sure-fire rule that I have learned in this business, it's that I don't know anything about human nature."

"I tell you, in my opinion, the cornerstone of democracy is free press - that's the cornerstone."

"Suddenly, the screens were dominated by American entertainment to the extent of something like 95 percent. As a result, audiences turned away from the kinds of films that we used to make."

"I remember in 1968 when we were in Cannes, in the festival, and we were supposed to be there 10 days, and the second day the festival collapsed because the French, you know, film-makers raised the red flag in the festival and ended the festival."

"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."


"I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films."

"You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost."


"Buildings designed exclusively on scientific principles will depress their occupants and constrain their creativity."

"There are a thousand weird untold stories in the Australian film industry, this has been one of them."
Film,

"With a film, I do my best to understand the author's intentions and try to bring the characters to life."

"If you don't cast well, you can be in real trouble."

"I'm such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own."

"I think I've made some pretty decent films in the '80s and '90s."


"Will Smith is young, he's cool and my kids have his CDs."


"When things go right it's hard to figure out why, but when things go wrong it's really easy."

"I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten."

"With a genre like film noir, everyone has these assumptions and expectations. And once all of those things are in place, that's when you can really start to twist it about and mess around with it."

"Yes, women are stronger than us. They face more directly the problems that confront them, and for that reason they are much more spectacular to talk about. I don't know why I am more interested in women, because I don't go to any psychiatrists, and I don't want to know why."

"I got into film-making because I was interested in making entertaining movies, which I felt there was a lack of."

"I was frustrated because I couldn't get going, as I was trying to figure out how to make films. I had various jobs, I taught a SAT class, I was a bartender, I had a day job at an office and was making short films."

"For years all I seemed to be doing was lobbying politicians and others to persuade them that European culture needed movies, and that we had to protect it."

"The more she rejected us the more convinced I was that she was another version of the real Molly, her disdain for authority, her scepticism that she had to do what the white man told her because it was good for her... She is Molly."

"Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in the bath and she'd come in and sink my boats."

"We're quite volatile as individuals, but that doesn't work exponentially when we are together. Relationships are about eating humble pie."
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