- The overwhelming drive in the mainstream film business now is to make blockbuster animated films, preferably ones that can be cloned - repeated, reheated and sold in packs of two or three or six, like fizzy drinks.
- [on "Ben-Hur", 1959]: "Ben-Hur" is 212 minutes long.The rare passages of excitement, like the chariot race, are delivered by second-unit directors Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt. If only they had been given the whole project. You have to sit down and breathe deeply, because it is my duty to tell you that "Ben-Hur" won Best Picture - defeating "Anatomy Of A Murder".
- [on current Hollywood directors] Mostly born in the 1940s, they are of an age still to be our great directors, but they have yielded to a generation of new kids who do what the money demands. You see, we don't have great directors anymore. The computer makes our movies. Its efficient anonymity is the new style.
- [on "West Side Story" (1961)]: Natalie Wood was Maria and she was beautiful, but she stank of film star instead of city girl. Richard Beymer was Tony and he was a lump. Rita Moreno was great in the dancing - "America" - but she did not sing either. The result is 155 minutes of a pedestrian epic musical. I just wonder what Minnelli could have done in 100 minutes on very stylized sets, with wild kids.
- The cinema comes to life in the dark - like Dracula.
- The cinema comes to life with dark - like Dracula.
- There is something so frank, so modern in her feelings, yet so classical in her aura, so passionate and so wounded, that Isabelle Adjani seems made to play Sarah Bernhardt one day.
- The cinema has nothing to do with the camera being unable to lie. It goes beyond lies or truth in any absolute sense, recognizing only the event and the observer, depending upon the quality of the process of observation and taking its moral direction by the consequences of the observation.
- Facebook is an evolved movie system: it involves us looking at screens and converting our desire into a fee payment or a surrender to ads. Its aura of youthful generosity and utility belies how easily it could be turned into a system of surveillance and control.
- At the very least, movies have undermined our confidence in art.
- [on Katharine Hepburn]: Her best work has not dated a fraction of an inch; from 1932 to 1945, she had it in her to be the most interesting, difficult, challenging woman in American pictures. Why? I'd guess it has to do with her confusion, for she loved movies while disapproving of them.
- [on "Se7en" (1995)]: One of the most truly sadistic works the cinema has produced. Its very achievement is disgusting.
- [on Richard Harris]: He is most at home in terrible films.
- Hitchcock lived most of his life on the brink of censorship, and a lot of what he did was founded upon the idea that censorship would stop him from going too far. So he would sort of say to you, "Do you see that? Can you imagine if I went just a step further?" Knowing he's never going to be able to do it has a lot to do with how the suspense of these films is being established. In the '60s, when he has become all powerful, censorship is breaking down. So he easily thinks, "Oh, I can do anything now." And he's lost. He can show innuendo better than maybe anyone, but he can't show the real thing. So when he tries in a film like Frenzy, it's a very uncomfortable, awkward result.
- [observation, 2021] I'm an old man, but still feel young. And. I feel terribly fortunate that I lived through an age when there was enormous appreciation and rediscovery of classic cinema, allied to the breaking of so many new waves on the shore. And then, so much was happening in the 1960s and 1970s that was so exciting. I felt I was exactly the right age for it. I don't think it's the same now.
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