I think a lot of the most interesting work in art and in films are often kind of polarized opinions and affect people in very different ways, which may be less successful commercially, but they elicit a dialogue that's quite interesting.
The theatre has always been voraciously omnivorous. Dramatists have always raided every medium to find grist to their mill: myths, folk tales, newspapers, novels, films, works of art of all kinds.
The dean of the American Film Institute has written that I'm one of the very few auteurs in America. I've had freedom for 40 years to create art that is totally personal and is what I believe in.
I love music. I think it's a higher art form, in a way, than movies. You know, a film you see once, maybe twice. A song will follow you forever. It's a magical thing.
In LA I was watching At the Movies with Ebert and Roper, it was, nice to see them differentiate between the subject matter and the art form of making the film, and they both gave it thumbs up, and I was kind of pleased at their honesty as far as revi...
If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction.
Movies will end up being this esoteric art form, where only singular people will put films out in a small group of theaters.
When I was a teenager, my dad watched my films and told me I could go to art college and study animation. He made me see that I could do this for a living.
There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century.
I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.
When I started out in independent films in the early '70s, we did everything for the love of art. It wasn't about money and stardom. That was what we were reacting against. You'd die before you'd be bought.
The Butcher of Babylon featured in over 500 porn films between 1974 and 1982, and was best known for his motto: Come for the butcher, stay for the meat.
The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.
A film which followed the code of the Hays Office to the strictest letter might succeed in being a great work of art, but not in a world in which a Hays Office exists.
I don’t think Garbo with her clothes off, panting in a brass bed, would have been more sexy than she was.
I always believed in if you give your best, people will see it, and it moves to the next level. I got my first movie, and I gave it my best. Before I was done with that movie, I was offered my first feature film.
Critics think we try to make bad films. They think we want to spend five months of our lives making something bad. We always go out with the best of intentions, whether it's fluffy comedy or a drama.
'Up' was the best. The first 10 minutes of that movie made me weep. It was so well done... even if that montage was all I'd seen, just as a short film, that was great. That was my favorite thing of the year.
I have only recently got interested in film, and it is a strange way of working in many ways. But actually, when it is at its best, it's quite an extraordinary way of working between a director and an actor, to really explore an inner life.
There are so many huge roles in the theatre: if you've got the option to play Hedda Gabler on stage, why wouldn't you choose that over a three-line part in a Hollywood film as somebody's maid or somebody's wife or somebody's best friend?
With film, I have to be a team player; it's a whole different thing. I can't just be a one-man show. I have to learn how to use people to the best of their ability and motivate them to be as passionate about the project as I am.
