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Quotes by Director


"Jack Nicholson is a textbook actor who's very intuitive. He is absolutely brilliant at going as far as you can go, always pushing to the edge, but still making it seem real."

"There are things that Scotsmen get and other people don't get in the dialogue. Scottish characters can be pinpointed by a phrase, targeted very quickly."

"I think you're only free if you're working on very low or huge money."


"Don't get married to an actress because they're also actresses in bed."

"There was no actual person who was James Bond, despite all the books."

"I do feel that the trend is away from ageism and toward a recognition that older people have a unique voice."

"For people to understand me when I travel, I speak with my hands."

"To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition."

"Similar to the telescope or the telephone, television enables us to see or hear things we never dreamed of. When you look at the details, a concrete scene between people is really something incredibly unlikely, something subtle that requires extended description."

"You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy."

"I figured, 'When is that ever going to happen again?'. So I basically set out the opposite way movies are made; I set out with a budget first. I said, 'What can I do well for $40,000?'."

"When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well."

"And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too - not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story."

"I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating, not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me, the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form."

"If you do two versions of a film, they should be identical. With the same frames and settings."
Film,

"There is no reason why challenging themes and engaging stories have to be mutually exclusive - in fact, each can fuel the other. As a filmmaker, I want to entertain people first and foremost. If out of that comes a greater awareness and understanding of a time or a circumstance, then the hope is that change can happen."

"Well, I always run the risk of falling on my face, which has in fact happened."

"I think he was explicit that it was a slave labor situation, but I was not alarmed at that point, because there were so many tragedies involved in that war. That was the first time I had any indication that something was sort of strange."

"A 65-ft.-wide screen and 500 people reacting to the movie, there is nothing like that experience."

"Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying."

"We really love all sports, but we don't think in the long term. The reason we did Kingpin was because there was a script we really liked and we saw the possibilities."

"It seems that almost every time a valuable natural resource is discovered in the world-whether it be diamonds, rubber, gold, oil, whatever-often what results is a tragedy for the country in which they are found. Making matters worse, the resulting riches from these resources rarely benefit the people of the country from which they come."

"Well, a special screening was set up for government officials, so they didn't have to see the experience of going to see the film. They certainly aren't going to the projects to see for themselves the situation."

"I like the platform to show your art and everything that goes along with that. To show your voice and hopefully find films that are more politically driven, films that maybe inspire."
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