I've been the movie business for over 50 years, and I've done everything imaginable that could be done or ever was done by anybody.
Actors should be instinctive and spontaneous. If you think about acting, you're not going to be good.
Rome has New York's formlessness, aimlessness, a kind of hard-boiled sophistication, blase about everything. In their filmmaking, too, the Italians have this tongue-in-cheek sense of comedy.
If I thought about planning, I'd plan movies. If I thought about planning my life, I'd plan my life more rationally, not like New Yorkers who live their lives so irrationally, without reason. Maybe that's the connection between my movies and New York: the movies have the same kind of lack of overall design.
Andy wasn't capable of any complicated thoughts or ideas. Ideas need a verb and a noun, a subject. Andy spoke in a kind of stumbling staccato. You had to finish sentences for him. So Andy operated through people who could do things for him. He wished things into happening, things he himself couldn't do.
A good conservative is someone with an open mind.
Andy was not a director and not a writer. He operated the camera a little bit, and he wasn't even so good at that.
We are always getting photos and publicity from people who want to act in Andy's movies. We always throw them away. They don't seem to realize that the last thing we'd put into a movie is an actor. Because all the other movies use actors.
Most of the time, I leave the camera on the obvious special effects, like the rubber bodies, so that it become obvious they're not real.
Very few people took sordid things and made comedies out of them.
I adore jokes. They're a theatrical contrivance, but the irony of all fiction is that you approach reality by avoiding it a bit; you spoof it a bit.
Somewhere in the '60s, actors became wimps and basket-case psychotics.
