To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.
San Francisco would be a good location for a murder mystery.
You think she’s pretty, you ought to see my slingshot!
There are several differences between a footballl game and a revolution. For one thing, a football game usually lasts longer and the participants wear uniforms. Also there are more injuries at a football game.
Actually, I have no regard for money. Aside from its purchasing power, it’s completely useless as far as I’m concerned.
The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.
The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema.
Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
To me Psycho was a big comedy. Had to be.
Kicking is very important in football. In fact, some of the more enthusiastic players even kick the ball, occasionally.
I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.
A movie should be as long as one can hold their bladder.
There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever.
I’ve become a body of films, not a man, I am all those films.
I’m not much into rear window ethics.
We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.
In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking.’ When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it’s impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.
Love those wrongdoers, they need it more than you.
Content, I am not interested in that at all. I don’t give a damn what the film is about. I am more interested in how to handle the material so as to create an emotion in the audience. I find too many people are interested in the content. If you were painting a still life of some apples on a plate, it’s like you’d be worrying whether the apples were sweet or sour. Who cares?
Weren’t you ever booed at by your mother?!
Once the screenplay is finished, I’d just as soon not make the film at all... I have a strongly visual mind. I visualise a picture right down to the final cuts. I write all this out in the greatest detail in the script, and then I don’t look at the script while I’m shooting. I know it off by heart, just as an orchestra conductor needs not look at the score... When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you lose perhaps 40 percent of your original conception.