There are a lot of memories that are very… nutritious. I’ve had a very fortunate career. I’ve worked with practically every icon you can think of.

Whereas painting is a more rarefied art form, with a limited audience, I recognized film as this extraordinary social tool that could reach tremendous numbers of people.

You’re an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot.

It’s eighty percent script and twenty percent you get great actors. There’s nothing else to it.

The very reasons sometimes that you make a film are the reasons for its failure.

Olivia Newton-John was our first choice to play Sandy, but she was nervous about acting, whether she would feel comfortable with us and could pull it off at all.

If anyone’s been around some very long cocaine evenings, there’s nothing that’s in SCARFACE that we all haven’t seen before.

With me it was that defending the Communist Party was something worse than naming the names.

My favorite laser disk ever was the laser disk for The Graduate, which had a commentary track that wasn’t even the filmmakers, it was a professor, some film criticism guy who just happen to be...

We had this idea about a woman who you would see on the street and make a host of sexual assumptions, and they would all be wrong.

Character and emotionality don’t always have to be relegated to quieter, more simple constructs.

The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.

I had more fun making Traffic than either of the Ocean’s films.

But, I’ve made films in Japan, in Yugoslavia, all over Europe, all over the United States, Mexico, but not Hollywood.

Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it’s all fitted to the action, to the script, to...

I learned to take the first job that you have in the business that you want to get into. It doesn’t matter what that job is, you get your foot in the door.

I’m me, I live from film to mouth.

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

I made all these films and I had all kinds of great experiences. I worked with the great filmmakers and it was a very exciting life.

I don’t know a lot of agents like Al Hack.

One should make morals judgements for oneself.

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don’t.

I mean, I don’t know anything else that I would try to do, but it’s a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what’s a fantasy in your head and make...

I learned at a very early age, the easiest thing in the world is to tell the truth, and then you don’t have to remember what you said. It has nothing to do with morality,...

There would be a paragraph about some veteran digging tunnels for the Germans in a slave labor camp, or something like that. Finally I decided to look it up and go further into it.

I figure if it’s turns out well the film will have its own momentum and will carry into the video release. So it’s hard to really picture the DVD version when I’m in production.

Absurdity is what I like most in life, and there’s humor in struggling in ignorance. If you saw a man repeatedly running into a wall until he was a bloody pulp, after a while it...

There are always at least five good films at the end of the year to get nominated, but generally speaking nowadays, it’s more of the independent films that are recognized.

You never think the universe will reward your first choice – it just doesn’t work like that.

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

If anybody doubts my loyalty to my country, I’ll punch him in the nose, and I don’t care how old he is.

Well, I was born and raised in the Midwest, in Indiana specifically, and my childhood was full of weekend movies, you know, the Saturday and Sunday popcorn movies.

We wanted a supporting cast that would appeal to Baby Boomers who grew up in the fifties.

And that’s what’s so inspirational about something like DIONYSUS. It actually records the moment that it happened. Kind of like a document of the period.

Good luck has its storms.

On the other track I got to talk with Jon Poll, my editor, and we go into more detail about the decisions we made in both the production and the post-production. So I hope the...

We really want to see how the idea of an intellectual action movie is received by the world.

I did a pilot for Anything But Love in 1988 that didn’t sell.

The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

I know why we can’t have a frank discussion with our policymakers – if you’re in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong.

By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that’s led them into creating illusions,...

When you’re in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.

It’s always been my formula to get the next picture set up before anyone’s seen the last one.

Part of the issue of achievement is to be able to set realistic goals, but that’s one of the hardest things to do because you don’t always know exactly where you’re going, and you shouldn’t.

It’s a terrible thing to say I know. I’ve only done what I wanted to do. It’s a real luxury. I only made the pictures I wanted to make and lived in the places I’ve...

I long for the days when grosses were not even known. There was no weekend competition.

Our film examines the heroism, courage and prowess of the Soviet submarine force in ways never seen before.

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.