I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time.
The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.
Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them.
The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don't mean a conceit of the producer.
Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.
I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.
The first thing one must remember about film is that it is a young medium. And it is essential for every responsible artist to cultivate the ground that has been left fallow.
Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.
Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!
Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.
My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.
The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.
I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn't know what was ahead of me.
If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they're talking.
Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.
I'm one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour - and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.
Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.
