A strange thing has happened — while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They're obliged to overstate their own importance.
All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.
As far as the filmmaking process is concerned, stars are essentially worthless — and absolutely essential.
Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.
Curiosity doesn't matter any more. These days people don't want to be transported to emotional territories where they don't know how to react.
Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.
Does art reflect life? In movies, yes. Because more than any other art form, films have been a mirror held up to society's porous face.
Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.
Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are.
For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.
I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.
I guess I think that films have to be made totally by fascists — there's no room for democracy in making film.
I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it — yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
If you can't believe a little in what you see on the screen, it's not worth wasting your time on cinema.
In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
It struck me that the movies had spent more than half a century saying, ''They lived happily ever after'' and the following quarter-century warning that they'll be lucky to make it through the weekend. Possibly now we are now entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: You know it just might work.