A film is — or should be — more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.
Damn right, it's fun. There's good company. It's creative. It's adventurous. Combines high adventure and art with intellection. It's more fun than polo. It's like going undefeated in football. [When asked if making movies is fun]
Drama is life with the dull parts cut out of it.
Every time we got something into the camera it was as if we were saying to the 6 million ghosts — with a wry smile on our faces, and a sense of accomplishment — ''That's for you!'' [On shooting Schindler's List]
I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.
I'm gonna do four or five of these movies, and it's going to become my career. I'll have to keep expanding the bat suit, because I get fatter every year. I'll be bankrupt. I'll be out opening shopping malls, going from appearance to appearance in a cheesy van. [On playing Batman]
I've tried like hell to make bad movies good, and I can't. Maybe Marlon Brando has been able to do that at times. But even he has a hard time making The Appaloosa a good movie.
If my films make one more person miserable, I'll feel I have done my job.
In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write, but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.
In the beginning, all I wanted to do was to be a singer and a dancer. That was my real groove, my real interest. When it came to doing films, my biggest goal was to do a commercial.
It doesn't work if the bad guys kill his mother's uncle's friend's neighbor's pet dog. You've got to make the stakes high. [Explaining why the hero's woman must get shot]
It's hard to make a cultural phenomenon every time.
Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage.
My movies were the kind they show in prisons and airplanes, because nobody can leave.
No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight of the soul.
Nobody in TV makes as much money as Robert Redford, who likes to make movies for several million dollars only on the condition that they contain some sort of social message. I cannot take very seriously a social message delivered by an actor who is paid nine million dollars to deliver it, and who charges you five dollars to see it.
The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them.