For some strange reason we don’t go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like “American Beauty.” We’ve become a heavy-handed society.
The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.
One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.
Trash has given us an appetite for art.
I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
The worst thing about movie-making is that it’s like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes.
Her only flair is in her nostrils.
What is getting older if it isn’t learning more ways that you’re vulnerable?
Really, it’s not people who don’t understand us who drive us nuts – it’s when those who shouldn’t, do.
It’s sometimes discouraging to see all of a director’s movies, because there’s so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director’s artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he’s a hack.
Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.
Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery.
There is something spurious about the very term ‘a movie made for TV,’ because what you make for TV is a TV program.
For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on – there’s always something to watch.
Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control.
Economy, speed, nervousness, and desperation produce the final wasteful, semi-incoherent movies we see.
Movies have been doing so much of the same thing – in slightly different ways – for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.
Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.
When I see those ads with the quote ‘You’ll have to see this picture twice,’ I know it’s the kind of picture I don’t want to see once.