I shouldn’t make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.
I function better in the jungle in Amazonia or Antarctica or Alaska or the Sahara desert. An artificial environment like a studio has never attracted me. I could work in a studio, but I would never really feel at home.
The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendor.
You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn’t mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that’s what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia.
Without dreams we would be cows in a field, and I don’t want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project.
I never planned my career in steps. It’s all coming at me like burglars in the night.
If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films, I would do it.
I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard.
I’m not into the culture of complaint. I roll up my sleeves and somehow I get it together.
Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
There are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there’s insecurity, collapse of financial systems – that’s where film noir always hits fertile ground.
People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other’s murder.
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.