Sam Mendes Quotes
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I like throwing snowballs at small children.
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Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.
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I still can't quite believe it. Although there was something about the fact that it was a first-time writer, a first-time producer, and a first-time director all at the same time.
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I'm certainly getting a lot more mail... that's basically it.
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Now I'm back home, living in London, running my theater. I just want to enjoy all that.
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You freeze with the number of opportunities given to you and just decide to do nothing at all.
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The characters are trapped within the lifestyle. It's about what goes on before the movie starts.
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You've got to work. You've got to want an audience to sit forward in their chairs sometimes, rather than sit back and be bombarded with images.
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I deliberately, in a way, went for something that was a huge challenge and was a big period film. I was excited about the canvas on which I could tell the story as much as the story itself.
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When I drive through a field, I want to see green grass sometimes, and I don't want to see black and white.
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I don't think of it as a competition - which might surprise you, given the way movies are reported constantly.
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I don't think good and evil are polarized.
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I wanted to keep exploring... I'm not about to choose a series of movies in which I can use the same bag of tricks and style that I used in the first film.
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There's good and bad in everybody. I wasn't looking for the good, or looking for the bad. This is a man who signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago, and he's learned to live with it. He's tried to protect his family from it.
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You're in the lap of the gods. If people go, they go, and if they don't.
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The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.
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You think about taking audiences on a journey.
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Thank God I don't live in Los Angeles. I think if you're there the whole time it just gets out of proportion and you lose touch completely with reality.
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One movie is only one movie. I want to have a lifetime of making films.
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For me, certain shots or scenes are keys in the movie.
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Kevin and Annette... I wanted them to do it together. They clearly wanted to work with each other.
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I want to inspire, and be inspired.
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It's a risk casting anyone against type or what they're known to do. But there's one thing better than having a great actor, which is having a great actor who's never done what you're asking him to do. He's hungry to get out of the trailer every day and hungry to test himself.
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All I know is that I operate by going out to each of them and trying to learn the territory in which they operate. My language to each of them has to suit their brain.