If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it’s simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it’s a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place.
Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.
We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
Some of the most important caves, like Lascaux in the Dordogne region in France, have had to be closed down. There had been too many people allowed in, and they left a mold on the walls that is spreading and which can’t really be stopped.
I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.
Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
I’m a very professional man. I’m not out for the experience of adventure.
For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.
I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment.
I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.
I am torn between the beauty of the natural world, which you see all around us, and the idea that some dumb tornado could blow a telephone pole onto my sweet Camaro.
Ambition is to be the fastest runner on this planet, to be the first on the South Pole, which is a grotesque perversion of ambition. It’s an ego trip, and I’m not on an ego trip. I don’t have ambitions – I have a vision.
My contacts with the film industry can be described in very simple terms: The industry does not really need me, and I do not really need the industry.
Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.
I do other sorts of things. I act in other people’s movies. I direct operas. I write books.
If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!
There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you’ve got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I’m sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn’t have the same substance.
There’s a completely new culture out there. I’m not a participant of texting and driving – or texting at all – but I see there’s something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.
If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.
Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it’s not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it’s not your fault.