I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.
— Martin Scorsese
I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.
People want to classify and say, 'OK, this is a gangster film.' 'This is a Western.' 'This is a... ' You know? It's easy to classify and it makes people feel comfortable, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't really matter.
I mean I have a project that I have been wanting to make for quite a while now; and basically, it's a story of my parents growing up in the Lower East Side.
I don't think there's a subject matter that can't absorb 3-D; that can't tolerate the addition of depth as a storytelling technique.
Being a father at a later age is different from when I had my other two daughters when I was in my 20s and 30s. If you're in your 60s and you're with the kid every day, you're dealing with the mind of a child, so it opens up that childishness in you again.
It's interesting that these themes of crime and political corruption are always relevant.
The bottom line is, I tend to be going back to older and older music.
Part of making any endeavour is that each one has its own special problems. It's the nature of the process.
There was always a part of me that wanted to be an old-time director. But I couldn't do that. I'm not a pro.
My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house.
Well the thing is that the New York of 1846 to 1862 was very different from downtown New York now. Really nothing from that period still exists in New York.
My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else.
I always wanted to make a film that had this sort of Chinese-box effect, in which you keep opening it up and opening it up, and finally at the end you're at the beginning.
The young people today are the 21st century.
Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.
Most people have stereo vision, so why belittle that very, very important element of our existence?
Can a film really change anything? I mean, what was the last time? Maybe the Italian neo-realists, where they became the voice and the heart and the soul of Italy, a nation that had been destroyed. I don't know.
I'm sad to see celluloid go, there's no doubt. But, you know, nitrate went, by the way, in 1971. If you ever saw a nitrate print of a silent film and then saw an acetate print, you'd see a big difference, but nobody remembers anymore. The acetate print is what we have. Maybe. Now it's digital.
I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me.
The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.
I don't like being in houses alone.
I'm re-energized by being around people who mean a lot to me.
Zombies, what are you going to do with them? Just keep chopping them up, shooting at them, shooting at them.
If I'm not complaining, I'm not having a good time, hah hah!
You've got to understand when a collaborator isn't satisfied anymore.
People say you should do it this way, someone else suggests that, yes, there's financing, but maybe you should use this actor. And there are the threats, at the end - if you don't do it this way, you'll lose your box office; if you don't do it that way, you'll never get financed again... 35, 40 years of this, you get beat up.
As a child I had terrible asthma.
The Five Points was the toughest street corner in the world. That's how it was known. In fact, Charles Dickens visited it in the 1850s and he said it was worse than anything he'd seen in the East End of London.
Food tells you everything about the way people live and who they are.
Young film makers should learn how to deal with the money and learn how to deal with the power structure. Because it is like a battle.
I go through periods, usually when I'm editing and shooting, of seeing only old films.
People have to start talking to know more about other cultures and to understand each other.
I loved the idea of seeing the world through a boy's eyes.
When I was growing up, I don't remember being told that America was created so that everyone could get rich. I remember being told it was about opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit.
We can't keep thinking in a limited way about what cinema is. We still don't know what cinema is. Maybe cinema could only really apply to the past or the first 100 years, when people actually went to a theater to see a film, you see?
I still dislike phones, yeah!
Death comes in a flash, and that's the truth of it, the person's gone in less than 24 frames of film.
It's very good for me to remember what actors go through.
Working with HBO was an opportunity to experience creative freedom and 'long-form development' that filmmakers didn't have a chance to do before the emergence of shows like 'The Sopranos.'
I happen to like vampires more than zombies.
Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you're working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience.
There are two kinds of power you have to fight. The first is the money, and that's just our system. The other is the people close around you, knowing when to accept their criticism, knowing when to say no.
A lot of what I'm obsessed with is the relationship and the dynamics between people and the family, particularly brothers and their father.
The best I can do is to make a film every two years.
I think all the great studio filmmakers are dead or no longer working. I don't put myself, my friends, and other contemporary filmmakers in their category. I just see us doing some work.
The fact that food plays such an important part in my films has everything to do with my family.
It's hard to let new stuff in. And whether that admits a weakness, I don't know.
If we just sit and exist, and understand that, I think it will be helpful in a world that seems like a record that's going faster and faster, we're spinning off the edge of the universe.
If everything moves along and there are no major catastrophes we're basically headed towards holograms.
