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.

I mean, movies are like your kids or your fingers and toes or something, it’s pretty hard to pick favorites.

In every place there are 100 people who can say no and only one person who can say yes. You have to get a good piece of material to the right person.

I knew that if it ever got down to a choice between the Party and our traditional democratic structure I would fight the Party and our traditional democratic structure I would fight the Party to...

I hope we’re all kind of influencing each other now to keep the quality up on those things. They seem to be getting better and better and better as there’s not only sort of a...

This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top.

There’s evidence of a social decline in direct proportion to technology and the industrialization of the motion picture industry.

The thoughtful soul to solitude retires.

Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.

I’m here to make good pictures. If I don’t see it, I won’t touch it. I may not make a good picture, but I still gotta believe in it!

Well, the wonderful thing about making movies, oddly enough, is that they’re sort of highly motivated graduate studies in one or another field.

A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

I was thinking of doing something – I’m always sort of fascinated, you know, I have a fascination with watching these kids on MTV videos.

If the boy and girl walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last scene, it adds 10 million to the box office.

The DVD does make it a little easier for myself to trim things that are otherwise very difficult to let loose of – knowing that they’ll make it on the DVD.

We tried to make a movie that had sex and violence because we like sex and violence.

I don’t believe in censorship in any form.

You know, my friends, with what a brave carouse I made a Second Marriage in my house; favored old barren reason from my bed, and took the daughter of the vine to spouse.

I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don’t. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing...

Every single art form is involved in film, in a way.

Surviving is the only glory in war.