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Movies touch our hearts, and awaken our vision, and change the way we see things. They take us to other places. They open doors and minds. Movies are the memories of our lifetime. We need to keep them alive.
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It did remind me of something out of Greek mythology - the richest king who gets everything he wants, but ultimately his family has a curse on it from the Gods.
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I still dislike phones, yeah!
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You never know how much time you have left.
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The fact that food plays such an important part in my films has everything to do with my family.
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I think what happened there was just the budget would be too big to build these sets because nothing really exists here in New York of that period; you have to build it all.
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One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.
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Zombies, what are you going to do with them? Just keep chopping them up, shooting at them, shooting at them.
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I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.
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Some of my films are known for the depiction of violence. I don't have anything to prove with that any more.
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The Five Points was the toughest street corner in the world. That's how it was known. In fact, Charles Dickens visited it in the 1850s and he said it was worse than anything he'd seen in the East End of London.
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Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you're working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience.
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When I'm making a film, I'm the audience.
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Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.
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Well the thing is that the New York of 1846 to 1862 was very different from downtown New York now. Really nothing from that period still exists in New York.
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Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.
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Being a father at a later age is different from when I had my other two daughters when I was in my 20s and 30s. If you're in your 60s and you're with the kid every day, you're dealing with the mind of a child, so it opens up that childishness in you again.
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You make a deal. You figure out how much sin you can live with.
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I'm re-energized by being around people who mean a lot to me.
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I don't like being in houses alone.
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If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?
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People say you should do it this way, someone else suggests that, yes, there's financing, but maybe you should use this actor. And there are the threats, at the end - if you don't do it this way, you'll lose your box office; if you don't do it that way, you'll never get financed again... 35, 40 years of this, you get beat up.
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I mean I have a project that I have been wanting to make for quite a while now; and basically, it's a story of my parents growing up in the Lower East Side.
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On every film you suffer, but on some you really suffer.