Writing, by nature, is a fairly solitary occupation.
— Michael Cimino
I've got a room full of scripts. They go to the ceiling. I can't even hardly walk into it anymore. Most are original, and there are some adaptations like 'Man's Fate.'
Movies are about people; there're not about ideas. It's like great novels. Great novels are not about ideas. There's never been a great novel about ideas.
I wouldn't have had the life I've had without movies.
Family politics are worse than world politics. That's all I can say. You don't get to choose your family; you get to choose your friends. Your family is imposed upon you.
I was a child prodigy. Like Michelangelo, who could draw a perfect circle at age five. I was extremely gifted. I could paint a perfect portrait of someone at age five.
I never second-guess myself.
You couldn't make 'Heaven's Gate' today. Even were you to quadruple the resources to make the movie, you couldn't make it because the people don't exist.
When I was fifteen, I spent three weeks driving all over Brooklyn with a guy who was following his girlfriend.
Who cares about seeing 10,000 helicopter assaults? That's spectacle.
I wouldn't look pretty as a woman.
Most people I knew had been crippled by their educations. Some were even dying spiritually.
What we forget is that the Academy is a star-maker, or it reinforces the stardom of people.
A film maker's energy and creativity don't have to end when he turns over his film.
The Indians believe all things have spirit - even the hail that comes from the sky is spirit. If you believe that, which I implicitly do, everything is alive.
On a movie, you often work fourteen-, sixteen-hour days, six days a week, for six months. It is so easy to let up because of fatigue.
Even the details of a rifle, which are nothing but mechanical, if they are made carefully, with attention, become beautiful, satisfying.
It's always a daily struggle to write.
Every good war film, if you want to use that phrase - I don't think it's a good phrase, but if you want to use that phrase - every good film, a first-rate film about war, is an anti-war movie.
There's nothing but brutality and bravery or cowardice that comes out of war. That's pretty much it.
Hollywood has always been crazy. It's controlled anarchy. But how can you loathe something that has given you so much?
When a guy is perceived as macho, female editors aren't going to like it - because they all want to be men.
Nobody lives without making mistakes.
I've published a couple of short novels in France that I didn't want to publish in English because I loved the characters too much to subject them to American critics who were not exactly favorable toward my work.
I don't make movies to make a point; I make movies to tell stories about people.
When the rich kids got together, the most we ever did was cross against a red light.
War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.
Friendship and sentiment and the giving of one's words are very important.
I don't dispute the accounts of My Lai 4, but I think that anyone who is a student of the war, or anyone who was there, would agree that anything you could imagine happening probably happened.
'Leaving Las Vegas' is a relationship; 'Dead Man Walking' is a relationship, and they're very contained movies. They're compressed and not in wide open spaces all over the place.
It's one of the things that movies do offer you, despite all of their hardships - they offer you moments of transcendence.
All of those years, I felt like 'Heaven's Gate' was a beautiful, fantastically colored balloon tied to a string fastened to my wrist, so the balloon could never fly.
What distinguishes Vilmos Zsigmond from other cinematographers is, of course, talent but, more, physical stamina. You just can't be great without it.
There is always that need to feel that you're doing your possible best.
I feel very, very upset that, when it came time for me to get an Academy Award, that I didn't especially thank Clint Eastwood.
Every great movie is about the people, even if it's a great popular success like 'Gone With the Wind.' It's really not about the Civil War. It's about Scarlett and Rhett. That's who you go to see. You're not going to root for the North or pull for the South, or, you know, it's the people you remember.
Anybody who says they're bitter is sick in their soul. They've given up.
There's no service ribbon for people who fought in Korea. We lost over 30,000 men between 1951 and 1953 - as many as we lost in 15 years in Vietnam.
It's silly - you go to a plastic chapel in Vegas, you get married in 10 minutes, and it takes you 10 years to get divorced.
You can't look back.
It was just - I mean, 6,000 people giving you a standing ovation is quite an experience.
I've had enough rejection for 33 years. I don't need more.
Working-class, blue-collar guys who volunteered for Vietnam were ascribed certain political beliefs. It's time that this was redressed. It had nothing to do with politics. Once these men got to Vietnam, it was a matter of survival.
There's a need to dig up the past and analyze it.
I felt the need to unlearn my formal education.
It's one of the wonderful things that the Academy does - a talented person comes along like Mira Sorvino, and it elevates them up to stardom.
Being infamous is not fun. It becomes a weird occupation in and of itself.
We all want to experience that in our lives - a moment when we're two feet off the ground - and making movies gives you that opportunity. It comes and it goes so fast that it's unreal, but it does happen.
'Deer Hunter' is a movie; it is not an attempt to write history.
I have a very simple definition of a good movie: a good movie makes you forget you're watching a movie.
