When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
When I was about 9, I had polio, and people were very frightened for their children, so you tended to be isolated. I was paralyzed for a while, so I watched television.
Sequels are not done for the audience or cinema or the filmmakers. It’s for the distributor. The film becomes a brand.
The only TV I would be interested in exploring would be live television. There’s no substitute for a team of artists performing at their peak live when failure is possible. It’s a high-wire act. That excites me.
Today’s winemakers still worry about quality.
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.
To make great movies, there is an element of risk. You have to say, ‘Well, I am going to make this film, and it is not really a sure thing.’
When I was 13, I worked for Western Union. When the telegrams came in, I would glue them on the paper and deliver them on my bicycle.
I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. So if I can come home from working on a little film after doing it for 45 years and say, I learned so much today, that shows something about the cinema. Because the cinema is very young. It’s only 100 years old.
Music is a big factor in helping the illusion of the film come to life. The same way music brings back different periods of our lives.
I was excited to discover, in this tale by Eliade, the key themes that I most hope to understand better time, consciousness and the dreamlike basis of reality.
So much of the art of film is to do less. To aspire to do less.
But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?
When newspapers started to publish the box office scores of movies, I was horrified. Those results are totally fake because they never include the promotion budget.
When that happens – when risk is taken and the filmmakers dive into the subject matter without a parachute – very often what you get it something with those qualities that make it age well with the public.
I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In ‘The Godfather’ it was succession. In ‘The Conversation’ it was privacy. In ‘Apocalypse’ it was morality.
Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist would who deals with who we are and our times or our relationships.
You’re in a profession in which absolutely everybody is telling you their opinion, which is different. That’s one of the reasons George Lucas never directed again.
I still think Ned Beatty should’ve played Don Corleone.
I’m very proud of my flops, as much as of my successes.