You can't just tell actors, especially young ones, to 'act happy' and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.
— Roger Ebert
Life is made up of challenges that cannot be solved but only accepted.
One sign of a great actor is when he can be alone by himself on the screen, doing almost nothing, and producing one of a film's defining moments.
Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus' is a magnificent science-fiction film, all the more intriguing because it raises questions about the origin of human life and doesn't have the answers.
To die is one thing. How much worse to know that all the life that ever existed on this planet, and all it ever achieved, was to be obliterated?
Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you've never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius.
When we're discussing who to invite to a dinner party, my wife Chaz and I sometimes use the shorthand, 'good value for money,' which indicates guests expected to be entertaining.
It is hard enough to be good at all, but to be good in comedy speaks for your character.
On this ancient and miraculous world, where such beautiful natural and living things have evolved, something has gone wrong when life itself is used as a manufacturing process.
From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.
Open-heart surgery is now part of a typical life experience for many people. Folks talk casually about 'having a stent put in,' as if they had their tires rotated.
It's the same the world over. A Hollywood production comes to town, and the locals all turn movie crazy.
Who was the real Hitchcock? I interviewed him once and haven't a clue.
We are the playthings of the gods.
A film is a terrible thing to waste.
The problem with being sure that God is on your side is that you can't change your mind, because God sure isn't going to change His.
You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.
But considering that I walked in expecting no complexity at all, let alone the visual wonderments, 'Snow White and the Huntsman' is a considerable experience.
What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.
'Grand Illusion' and 'Rules of the Game' are routinely included on lists of the greatest films, and deserve to be.
Are vampires kinky? I didn't know.
We think of first love as sweet and valuable, a blessed if hazardous condition.
There's nothing like impending death to rouse you from existential boredom.
If you can act as if something is true, in a sense that makes it true.
I don't require movies to be about good people, and I don't reject screen violence.
We can't help identifying with the protagonist. It's coded in our movie-going DNA.
There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.
I remember when a Coke came in a six-ounce bottle, and delicious it was. Now it comes in sizes so big that I question how the human bladder can deal with the intake.
Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? They are in search of that elusive window of well-being that opens when you drink your way out of a hangover and aren't yet drunk all over again. The alcoholic's day consists of trying to keep that window open.
In the world of acting, many are thin but few are talented.
Sometimes it's all about the casting.
The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.
No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.
Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.
Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.
Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.
It is universally agreed that Jean Renoir was one of the greatest of all directors, and he was also one of the warmest and most entertaining.
'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' is without a doubt the best film we are ever likely to see on the subject - unless there is a sequel, which is unlikely, because at the end, the Lincolns are on their way to the theater.
I like smart movies about smart people, and enjoy it when most of the facts are on the table and we can contemplate them together.
I've never found kicks to the groin particularly funny, although recent work in the genre of the buddy movie suggests audience research must prove me wrong.
Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.
It is quite possible for the vulgar to be funny, but to succeed, it must rise to a certain genius.
A few actresses have all but set up shop as women of a certain age who attract younger lovers. I think of Susan Sarandon, Cameron Diaz and Isabelle Huppert.
Why is it that English, drama and music teachers are most often recalled as our mentors and inspirations? Maybe because artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.
In Hollywood, 'under development' means 'all I have is the title.'
It's rare to find a film that goes for broke and says, 'To hell with the consequences.'
I believe that young people wearing hoods, unless they are very young, can be frightening. What are they hiding? Why don't they want to come out into the light with the rest of us? They may be perfectly nice, but the hoods send an uncertain statement.
Time is what the depressed and panicked lack.
Clouds do not really look like camels or sailing ships or castles in the sky. They are simply a natural process at work. So too, perhaps, are our lives.
I am utterly bored by celebrity interviews. Most celebrities are devoid of interest.
