Film Quotes
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We were in another planet and we were reaching for something closer to a fable. It was something fabulous. I started looking at the film as if it happened in another planet and that allowed me even more freedom.
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There's an ecstasy about doing something really good on film: the composition of a shot, the drama within the shot, the texture... It's palpable.
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The play has to work for the super fans, and not speak down to them, and yet it had to play to those people who maybe had never read a Harry Potter book or seen the films.
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I know what I do. I know what I put on film. I know what I try to do. I don't want to talk about what I've done.
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I like having deadlines... a film release date or a concert premiere date. It channels one's energy into doing often remarkable work that oceans of extra time would probably not improve upon.
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I had a terrible motorcycle accident (in the 1970s), in San Francisco as matter of fact. Doing a picture called... oh, this is terrible. It's a very well-known film and I can't remember the name. That's what happens when you get older... I fell off a bridge in San Francisco and was laid up for two years.
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I'd like to be a better writer, but I have no dreams to direct or do a screenplay. And I'd love to have a big starring role in a movie because the paycheck would be bigger. That's the only reason I do films.
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Film is a strange thing.
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We'll probably look at the film tomorrow and see some real good things, but right now we're our own worst enemy.
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Hopefully each film can be given a musical voice of its own, which is not to say that the instrumentation is always unique, but that the relationship between the sound and the image is unique.
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I really think music and movement - dance, you know - and literature inform my visuals. I think film is also based in dance. The relationship between me, the camera and the actor is always a dance.
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Well, I am from India and I wanted to make films in English for the international market in India. So that was really the main thing, and then of course economically it was cheaper to make films in India.
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I think the purpose of test screenings is different for the studio and for the filmmaker. For the studio, I think they want to know whether the film works or not.
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I began writing for theater, and maybe because of that I've always thought of myself as a theater writer who does work in film sometimes.
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Writing and making films aren't different things to me. Or maybe it has become so, now. Making film is a very long process and you have to be physically strong. The literary work is more mystical, because it's only the writer, and connected to something inside.
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I did the film because it is a personal thing for me. Besides its production values as a film, it has its story, its intrigue, its drama.
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Every decent director has only one subject, and finally only makes the same film over and over again. My subject is the exploitability of feelings, whoever might be the one exploiting them. It never ends. It's a permanent theme. Whether the state exploits patriotism, or whether in a couple relationship, one partner destroys the other.
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I think making a good film shot is joyful.
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In my view the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.
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I don't watch my own films. There is little time; I'd rather see another film.
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There was also the myth of the western films. But my films are borrowed not from the story of the West in America but from the story of cinema.
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An important Italian critic once gave Fistful of Dollars a very bad review when it came out. Then he went to the university here Rome with Once Upon a Time in America. We showed it to 10,000 students. And while the man was speaking that day to the students, with me present, he said, "I have to state one thing. When I gave that review about Sergio's films, I should have taken into account that on Sergio Leone's passport, there should not be written whether the nationality is Italian or anything else. What should be written is: 'Nationality: Cinema.' "
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I did a small, small thing in Quiz Show, where I was really just a glorified extra. But, you know, New York actor, few days on a film set: Great! I was probably making subway fare on the play that I was doing at the time. I always think of The Underneath as the first film that I ever did.
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The essence of the cinema that I'm interested in is a combination of love, rage, and curiosity. Sometimes it's hard to see those intentions, or maybe it's hard to portray them on film in a way that doesn't sound too preachy or irrelevant. So instead of saying it out loud, you say it multiple times in the movie by hiding it. You get a sensation after you see the whole film throughout yourself.
