A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction.
You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect mediocrity – no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable.
The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.
Bad films gave me the courage to try making a movie.
The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.
The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it’s simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.
Sanitised violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.
A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.
Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.
One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.
I don’t like doing interviews. There is always the problem of being misquoted or, what’s even worse, of being quoted exactly.
I’ve got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists. Neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.
You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.
Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write ‘War and Peace’ in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ’forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.
If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
I’m happy – at times – making films. I’m certainly unhappy not making films.
Everybody has their black moments.
My period as a young teenager when you really listen to music so you can get understand a little bit more about what the music is was, say, 1965 to 1968. I was just lucky to be in those times.