I didn't realize there are generations who do not know about the origins of film.
— Martin Scorsese
Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.
If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?
You gotta understand, when moving images first started, people wanted sound, color, big screen and depth.
Alcohol decimated the working class and so many people.
Very often I've known people who wouldn't say a word to each other, but they'd go to see movies together and experience life that way.
I mean, music totally comes from your soul.
I've seen many, many movies over the years, and there are only a few that suddenly inspire you so much that you want to continue to make films.
As you grow older, you change.
All my life, I never really felt comfortable anywhere in New York, except maybe in an apartment somewhere.
I don't really see many people... don't really go anywhere either.
On every film you suffer, but on some you really suffer.
I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest.
Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god... I loved his idea of what filmmaking was.
I can't really envision a time when I'm not shooting something.
I don't agree with everything he did in his life, but we're dealing with this Howard Hughes, at this point. And also ultimately the flaw in Howard Hughes, the curse so to speak.
I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.
I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.
I wish I could do everything in 3D.
I grew up in the Lower East Side, an Italian American - more Sicilian, actually.
Hong Kong cinema is something you can't duplicate anyway.
You make a deal. You figure out how much sin you can live with.
Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.
I've been to North Africa many times.
You don't make pictures for Oscars.
I think when you're young and have that first burst of energy and make five or six pictures in a row that tell the stories of all the things in life you want to say... well, maybe those are the films that should have won me the Oscar.
My father had this mythological sense of the old New York, and he used to tell me stories about these old gangs, particularly the Forty Thieves in the Fourth Ward.
I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters.
Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.
Eradicating a religion of kindness is, I think, a terrible thing for the Chinese to attempt.
I also saw the Dalai Lama a few times.
I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.
I grew up within Italian-American neighborhoods, everybody was coming into the house all the time, kids running around, that sort of stuff, so when I finally got into my own area, so to speak, to make films, I still carried on.
I love the look of planes and the idea of how a plane flies. The more I learn about it the better I feel; while I still may not like it, I have a sense of what is really happening.
There are times when you have to face your enemies, sit down and deal with it.
The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can't articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound?
I'm an older generation.
One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.
Well, I think in my own work the subject matter usually deals with characters I know, aspects of myself, friends of mine - that sort of thing.
I've always liked 3D.
Sometimes when you're heavy into the shooting or editing of a picture, you get to the point where you don't know if you could ever do it again.
I make different films now.
Some of my films are known for the depiction of violence. I don't have anything to prove with that any more.
When I'm making a film, I'm the audience.
You never know how much time you have left.
The term 'giant' is used too often to describe artists. But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.
Every year or so, I try to do something; it keeps me refreshed as to what's going on in front of the lens, and I understand what the actor is going through.
I always say that I've been in a bad mood for maybe 35 years now. I try to lighten it up, but that's what comes out when you get me on camera.
I do know that some Buddhists are able to attain peace of mind.
I know there were many good policemen who died doing their duty. Some of the cops were even friends of ours. But a cop can go both ways.
