“I'm not going to have a perfect career. It's better to be Billy Wilder and make lots of movies and have five or six great ones than to make so few movies that when you make a bad one it crushes you.”
Movies hold up a mirror to who we are and a window to who we could be. These quotes come from filmmakers, actors, critics, and devoted fans who understand that cinema is not just entertainment — it is how a culture tells its stories.
“The only reason why I would like to be accepted? Because if your movies don't do well, after a while you don't get to make any more movies.”
“I'm not going to have a perfect career. It's better to be Billy Wilder and make lots of movies and have five or six great ones than to make so few movies that when you make a bad one it crushes you.”
“I hadn't made a big-budget film, and in Hollywood there's a sort of man and boys situation. You're a man, you make $80 million movies! As if it's harder to make an $80 million movie. Well, I guess businesswise it is because you have more executives to argue with.”
“Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies.”
“Right now, if you're interested in being a dramatic actor, they're not making that many just regular dramas. Movies have to have some other thing going on.”
“I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.”
“I grew up on Bette Davis movies, and Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe.”
“One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that.”
“I wasn't allowed to go to movies when I was kid my father was a minister. 101 Dalmatians and King of Kings, that was the extent of it.”
“Movies are very subjective.”
“All movies assault the viewer in one way or another.”
“Look, at the same time that I don't want to be a celebrity, I understand that when you make movies you put yourself out in the public eye. I'd be a baby and a fool to be like, 'Why are there cameras taking pictures of me?' when I'm on a billboard for a movie. I think that's a very absurd concept.”
“I just grew up watching a lot of movies. I'm attracted to this genre and that genre, this type of story, and that type of story. As I watch movies I make some version of it in my head that isn't quite what I'm seeing - taking the things I like and mixing them with stuff I've never seen before.”
“I'll tell you what I really enjoy. We all go to the movies, we all watch television, we know what they're about, how they work. When the main character is a cop or a spy, it's very exciting, but I also very much enjoy when the main characters are nobodies - a trucker.”
“Hollywood is throwing action movies at me.”
“In terms of the romantic kind of lead, I just never enjoy those movies very much. Maybe they'll come to interest me more as I get older. I doubt it, but maybe. Romantic comedies tend to be, for me, an oxymoron.”