My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.
I’d like to do a comedy with Emma Thompson. I admire her as an actress so much. I love her. And I didn’t know it until recently that her whole career started in comedy.
I’m in complete remission. I’m alive and well.
As they say in Corsica... Goodbye.
Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!
I love acting, especially if it’s a fantasy of some kind, where it’s not just realistic, it’s not naturalism.
I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I’m on the right track. But yes, I don’t like to get Maudlin. And I have a tendency towards it.
Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn’t yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?
I like – it’s not that I want to be someone different from me, but I suppose it partly is that. I love creating a character in a fantastical situation, like Dr. Frankenstein, like Leo Bloom, a little caterpillar who blossoms into a butterfly. I love that.
And in ‘Frisco Kid’ and in ‘The Woman in Red’ I had to ride badly. Then you have to really ride well in order to ride badly.
I wanted to do – there was this film called ‘Magic’ that Anthony Hopkins did. And the director wanted me. The writer wanted me. Joe Levine said no, I don’t want any comedians in this.
I was so afraid to feel free to enjoy my own life if my mother was sick and suffering everyday of her’s. I didn’t think I had the right.
So my idea of neurotic is spending too much time trying to correct a wrong. When I feel that I’m doing that, then I snap out of it.
For what we are about to see next, we must enter quietly into the realm of genius!
I’m funny on camera sometimes. In life, once in a while. Once in a while.
Actors fall into this trap if they missed being loved for who they really were and not for what they could do – sing, dance, joke about – then they take that as love.
I wanted to be an actor. Maybe a comic actor, but an actor. That’s what got me into acting was putting on an act, because in life, I wasn’t funny and I felt on stage or in the movies, I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.
Lots of things are hard work, but I think writing, for me, after I started acting at 13 years old. I like writing now much more than I do acting only because, well, partly because the scripts that are offered are junk.
I love the art of acting, and I love film, because you always have anther chance if you want it. You know, if we – if this isn’t going well, you can’t say – well, you could say – let’s stop. Let’s start over again, Gene, because you were too nervous.
I think to be believed – onstage or on-screen – is the one hope that all actors share. Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn’t yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?
Making Young Frankenstein was the happiest I’d ever been on a film.