Once you finish a film, it doesn’t belong to you anymore – it belongs to the audience to interpret it the way they feel like interpreting.
If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.
If you read any of the biographies on J. Edgar Hoover, you find that they contradict each other more than they agree. Often times, they’re often told from a political perspective.
I’d been trying to retire to the back of the camera for quite a few years. And then, in 1970, when I first started directing, I if I could pull this off, I can some day just move in back of the camera and stay there.
Writing is a creative art form and the acting and directing is more of an interpretive art form.
Whatever the drama of the story is, you have to be true to it.
Acting gets into your blood, after so many years, and I just always like revisiting it. It’s fun to meet new people and watch them coming along, at different stages of their careers.
If you feel like you’ve got something to offer you should do it while the iron’s hot.
The only reason I ever thought about retiring from the front part of the camera as opposed to the back is sometimes you think, “How many roles are there for someone my age?”
If you’ve done what you intended and if nobody tampered with it, then it’s yours. And if people don’t like it, then they just don’t agree with you on that subject matter, and that’s life.
Nobody wants to make something that displeases people, but once you make a film, that’s out of your control and you can’t think about that. You just have to follow your head and make sure that you’re satisfied by putting down what you intended.
I would like to be interpreted as a liberal libertarian, like leave everybody alone and let them do their own thing.
I always like to try different things, different genres; stories that have a dramatic element and can generate conflict which I find appealing; where the characters have to overcome obstacles. That kind of thing is challenging.
A lot of people regret, because we live in a society that reveres being at the prime of life and everything, but you have certain primes at certain times, and mine happens to be...
You spend your life training to be an actor, observing people’s characteristics so that you can design characters around what you’ve seen.
When you’re an actor, you’re so busy: people are always coming up to you and pulling your collar, making sure that things fit, brushing your hair and you’re always being yanked up, so finally when you’re behind a camera, you’re just a slob.
Like most pictures that I’ve done, I’ve had no idea whether anyone would ever want to see ’em. But I figured, I’d like to see it.
Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.
I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.
Work hard, keep your nose clean, and just stick around.
On a scale of one to ten you’re a two, and that’s cuz I’ve never seen a one.