Quotes

I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.

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 would not think of quarreling with your interpretation nor offering any other, as I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself.

Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write "War and Peace" in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.

Art consists of reshaping life but it does not create life, nor cause life.

I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.

How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo Da Vinci had written at the bottom of the canvas, "The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover"? This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.

[on the complaint that his films were emotionally cold] I ought not to be regarded as a once happy man who has been bitten in the jugular and compelled to assume the misanthropy of a vampire.

Call it enlightened cowardice, if you like. Actually, over the years I discovered that I just didn't enjoy flying, and I became aware of compromised safety margins in commercial aviation that are never mentioned in airline advertising. So I decided I'd rather travel by sea, and take my chances with the icebergs. . . I am afraid of airplanes. I've been able to avoid flying for some time but, I suppose, if I had to I would. Perhaps it's a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. At one time I had a pilot's license and 160 hours of solo time on single-engine light aircraft. Unfortunately, all that seemed to do was make me mistrust large airplanes.

I believe Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini are the only three filmmakers in the world who are not just artistic opportunists. By this I mean they don't just sit and wait for a good story to come along and then make it. They have a point of view which is expressed over and over and over again in their films, and they themselves write or have original material written for them.

I've never achieved spectacular success with a film. My reputation has grown slowly. I suppose you could say that I'm a successful filmmaker--in that a number of people speak well of me. But none of my films have received unanimously positive reviews, and none have done blockbuster business.

I've got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists, neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.

The criminal and the soldier at least have the virtue of being against something or for something in a world where many people have learned to accept a kind of grey nothingness, to strike an unreal series of poses in order to be considered normal . . . It's difficult to say who is engaged in the greater conspiracy--the criminal, the soldier, or us.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

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.

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale.

I haven't come across any recent new ideas in film that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.

I believe that drugs are basically of more use to the audience than to the artist. I think that the illusion of oneness with the universe, and absorption with the significance of every object in your environment, and the pervasive aura of peace and contentment is not the ideal state for an artist. It tranquilizes the creative personality, which thrives on conflict and on the clash and ferment of ideas. The artist's transcendence must be within his own work; he should not impose any artificial barriers between himself and the mainspring of his subconscious. One of the things that's turned me against LSD is that all the people I know who use it have a peculiar inability to distinguish between things that are really interesting and stimulating and things that appear to be so in the state of universal bliss that the drug induces on a "good" trip. They seem to completely lose their critical faculties and disengage themselves from some of the most stimulating areas of life. Perhaps when everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful.

I don't mistrust sentiment and emotion, no. The question becomes, "Are you giving them something to make them a little happier, or are you putting in something that is inherently true to the material?" Are people behaving the way we all really behave, or are they behaving the way we would like them to behave? I mean, the world is not as it's presented in Frank Capra films. People love those films--which are beautifully made--but I wouldn't describe them as a true picture of life. The questions are always, "Is it true? Is it interesting?" To worry about those mandatory scenes that some people think make a picture is often just pandering to some conception of an audience. Some films try to outguess an audience. They try to ingratiate themselves, and it's not something you really have to do. Certainly audiences have flocked to see films that are not essentially true, but I don't think this prevents them from responding to the truth.

[on An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)] I think Louis Gossett Jr.'s performance was wonderful, but he had to do what he was given in the story. The film clearly wants to ingratiate itself with the audience. So many films do that. You show the drill instructor really has a heart of gold--the mandatory scene where he sits in his office, eyes swimming with pride about the boys and so forth. I suppose he actually is proud, but there's a danger of falling into what amounts to so much sentimental bullshit.

I have a wife, three children, three dogs, seven cats. I'm not a Franz Kafka, sitting alone and suffering.

To make a film entirely by yourself, which initially I did, you may not have to know very much about anything else, but you must know about photography.

Sanitized violence in movies has been accepted for years. What seems to upset everybody now is the showing of the consequences of violence.

[on Charles Chaplin] Chaplin is all content and little form. Nobody could have shot a film in a more pedestrian way than Chaplin.

[on why he shoots so many takes] Because actors don't know their lines.

I do not always know what I want, but I do know what I don't want.

Observancy is a dying art.

The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it's simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves.

[Sergei M. Eisenstein] does it with cuts, Max Ophüls does it with fluid movement. [Charles Chaplin] does it with nothing. Eisenstein seems to be all form and no content, Chaplin is all content and little form. Nobody could have shot a film in a more pedestrian way than Chaplin. Nobody could have paid less attention to story than Eisenstein. Alexander Nevsky (1938) is, after all, a pretty dopey story. "Potemkin" [Bronenosets Potemkin (1925)] is built around a heavy propaganda story. But both are great filmmakers.

There's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious: we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly. Also, ghost stories appeal to our craving for immortality. If you can be afraid of a ghost, then you have to believe that a ghost may exist. And if a ghost exists, then oblivion might not be the end.

[on why he chose Shelley Duvall for The Shining (1980)] I had seen all of her films and greatly admired her work. I think she brought an instantly believable characterization to her part. The wonderful thing about Shelley is her eccentric quality. The way she talks, the way she moves, the way her nervous system is put together. Shelley seemed to be exactly the kind of woman who would marry someone like [Jack Nicholson (I)] and be stuck with him.

There are very few directors, about whom you'd say you automatically have to see everything they do. I'd put Fellini, Bergman and David Lean at the head of my first list, and Truffaut at the head of the next level.

Part of my problem is that I cannot dispel the myths that have somehow accumulated over the years. Somebody writes something, it's completely off the wall, but it gets filed and repeated until everyone believes it. For instance, I've read that I wear a football helmet in the car.

One of the things that gave me the most confidence in trying to make a film was seeing all the lousy films that I saw. Because I sat there and thought, "Well, I don't know a goddamn thing about movies, but I know I can make a film better than that".

[on Jack Nicholson] I believe that Jack is one of the best actors in Hollywood, perhaps on a par with the greatest stars of the past like Spencer Tracy and James Cagney. I should think that he is on almost everyone's first-choice list for any role which suits him. His work is always interesting, clearly conceived and has the X-factor, magic. Jack is particularly suited for roles which require intelligence. He is an intelligent and literate man, and these are qualities almost impossible to act. In The Shining (1980), you believe he's a writer, failed or otherwise.

[on why he decided to make Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) as a comedy] As I kept trying to imagine the way in which things would really happen, ideas kept coming to me which I would discard because they were so ludicrous. I kept saying to myself: "I can't do this. People will laugh".

The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.

I can't honestly say what led me to make any of my films. The best I can do is to say I just fell in love with the stories. Going beyond that is a bit like trying to explain why you fell in love with your wife: she's intelligent, has brown eyes, a good figure. Have you really said anything? Since I am currently going through the process of trying to decide what film to make next, I realize just how uncontrollable is the business of finding a story, and how much it depends on chance and spontaneous reaction. You can say a lot of "architectural" things about what a film story should have: a strong plot, interesting characters, possibilities for cinematic development, good opportunities for the actors to display emotion, and the presentation of its thematic ideas truthfully and intelligently. But of course, that still doesn't really explain why you chose something, nor does it lead you to a story. You can only say that you probably wouldn't choose a story that doesn't have most of those qualities.

From the very beginning, all of my films have divided the critics. Some have thought them wonderful, and others have found very little good to say. But subsequent critical opinion has always resulted in a very remarkable shift to the favorable. In one instance, the same critic who originally rapped the film has several years later put it on an all-time best list. But of course, the lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.

[on Barry Lyndon (1975)] Ryan O'Neal was the best actor for the part. He looked right and I was confident that he possessed much greater acting ability than he had been allowed to show in many of the films he had previously done. In retrospect, I think my confidence in him was fully justified by his performance, and I still can't think of anyone who would have been better for the part. The personal qualities of an actor, as they relate to the role, are almost as important as his ability, and other actors, say like Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson or Dustin Hoffman, just to name a few who are great actors, would nevertheless have been wrong to play Barry Lyndon. I liked Ryan and we got along very well together.

[on The Shining (1980)] I've always been interested in ESP and the paranormal. In addition to the scientific experiments which have been conducted suggesting that we are just short of conclusive proof of its existence, I'm sure we've all had the experience of opening a book at the exact page we're looking for, or thinking of a friend a moment before they ring on the telephone. But "The Shining" didn't originate from any particular desire to do a film about this. I thought it was one of the most ingenious and exciting stories of the genre I had read. It seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: "Jack Nicholson must be imagining these things because he's crazy." This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing. The novel is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is often all that really matters.

I've never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, "Don't try to fly too high", or whether it might also be thought of as "Forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings".

I think aesthetically recording spontaneous action, rather than carefully posing a picture, is the most valid and expressive use of photography.

One of the things that I always find extremely difficult, when a picture's finished, is when a writer or a film reviewer asks, "Now, what is it that you were trying to say in that picture?" And without being thought too presumptuous for using this analogy, I like to remember what T.S. Eliot said to someone who had asked him--I believe it was about "The Waste Land"--what he meant by the poem. He replied, "I meant what it said." If I could have said it any differently, I would have.

Music is one of the most effective ways of preparing an audience and reinforcing points that you wish to impose on it. The correct use of music, and this includes the non-use of music, is one of the great weapons that the filmmaker has at his disposal.

A director can't get anything out of an actor that he doesn't already have. You can't start an acting school in the middle of making a film.