I’m trying to suggest a kind of Middle Earth, in Tolkien terms. It’s a contiguous world; it’s like ours but different.
You can’t get an actor to do something that is beyond his range, so you have to be aware of the range of the actor and, if necessary, alter the part to suit the actor.
All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived.
I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.
Black-and-white gives you that sort of parallel world. Also, it’s very close to the condition of dreaming, to the unconscious.
The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead...
Up until the middle to late ’60s, it was a choice to film in black-and-white or color. But then television became so vital to a film’s finance, and television won’t show black-and-white. So that killed it off, really.
What is passion? Passion is surely the becoming of a person.
I only storyboard scenes that require special effects, where it is necessary to communicate through pictures.
When actors are being defensive and defending their position, that is when you get less than good acting.
I was in Japan, and my assistant director had worked with Kurosawa. I used quite of number of Kurosawa’s crew.
There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.
There are always forces at work in a society, which are really forces of censorship – either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it’s books or art or film.
Movie-making is the process of turning money into light. All they have at the end of the day is images flickering on a wall.
And you poor creatures – who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business, too?
I love green. Green is the color of nature, trees. I’m a tree freak. I spend a lot of my time planting trees, nurturing them, and studying them. It’s one of the colors I couldn’t live without.
What we need is someone to abolish the House Of Lords, get rid of the Royal Family...