There is a profound and ineradicable taint of antisemitism in the British.
My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
The great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream.
Let the cut tell the story. Otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you’ve got narration.
Make the audience wonder what’s going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.
The terror and beauty of the dream come from the connection of previously unrelated mundanities of life.
The dream and the film are the juxtaposition of images in order to answer a question.
The audience requires not information but drama.
Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way, and you make a better movie. This is my experience.
The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.
The work of the director is the work of constructing the shot list from the script.
The images in a dream are vastly varied and magnificently interesting.
People ask me, ‘What do you do?’ And I tell them I’m a writer, but always with the silent reservation, ‘I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.’
Art is about the spontaneous connection of the artist to his own unconscious – about insight beyond reason. If his insight were reasonable, anyone could do it, but anyone cannot. Only few can, and they are called.
There’s something in me that just wants to create dialogue.
In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.
Listen, here’s the thing about an English degree – if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.
The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so: and his right to do so is guaranteed by the Constitution.
The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, ‘What does the protagonist want?’ That’s what drama is. It comes down to that. It’s not about theme, it’s not about ideas, it’s not about setting, but what the protagonist wants.
The so-called assault weapons ban is a hoax. It is a political appeal to the ignorant. The guns it supposedly banned have been illegal for 78 years. Did the ban make them ‘more’ illegal? The ban addresses only the appearance of weapons, not their operation.