Quotes

„The right reading for this is the one I’m giving.“
„An audience is not so much a complement to an actor’s ego, as a challenge to his capacities.“
„Even if I’d stayed [in the US to finish The Magnificent Ambersons I would’ve had to make compromises on the editing, but these would’ve been mine and not the fruit of confused and often semi-hysterical committees. If I had been there myself I would have found my own solutions and saved the pictures in a form which would have carried the stamp of my own effort.“
„Thank you, Donald, for that well-meant but rather pedestrian introduction. Regarding yourself, I quote from the third part of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Act Two, Scene One. Richard speaks, “Were thy heart as hard as steel/ As thou hast shown it flinty by thy deeds/ I come to pierce it, or to give thee mine.” To translate into your own idiom, Donald; you’re a yo-yo. Now I direct my remarks to Dean Martin, who is being honored here tonight… for reasons that completely elude me. No, I’m not being fair to Dean because – this is true – in his way Dean, and I know him very well, has the soul of a poet. I’m told that in his most famous song Dean authored a lyric which is so romantic, so touching that it will be enjoyed by generations of lovers until the end of time. Let’s share it together. [Opens a songsheet for Dean’s “That’s Amore” and reads in a monotone] “When the moon hits your eye/ Like a big pizza-pie/ That’s amore” Now, that’s what I call ‘touching’, Dean. It has all the romanticism of a Ty-D-Bol commercial. “When the world seems to shine/ Like you’ve had too much wine/ That’s amore” What a profound thought. It could be inscribed forever on a cocktail napkin. Hey, there’s more. “Tippy-tippy-tay/ Like a gay tarantella” Like a gay tarantella? Apparently, Dean has a ‘side Dean’ we know nothing about. “When the stars make you drool/ Just like a pasta fazool…. Scuzza me, but you see/ Back in old Napoli/ That’s amore” No, Dean; that’s infermo, Italian for “sickened”. Now, lyrics like that – lyrics like that ought to be issued with a warning: a song like that is hazardous to your health. Ladies and gentlemen… [motions to Dean] you are looking at the end result!“
„The people who’ve done well within the [Hollywood] system are the people whose instincts, whose desires [are in natural alignement with those of the producers] — who want to make the kind of movies that producers want to produce. People who don’t succeed — people who’ve had long, bad times; like [Jean] Renoir, for example, who I think was the best director, ever — are the people who didn’t want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make. Producers didn’t want to make a Renoir picture, even if it was a success.“
„But you can’t emphasize “beef”, that’s like his wanting me to emphasize “in” before “July”! Come on, fellows, you’re losing your heads! I wouldn’t direct any living actor like this in Shakespeare! The way you do this, it’s impossible!“
„Hollywood is Hollywood. There’s nothing you can say about it that isn’t true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be bitter — you’re the one who sat down, and joined the game.“
„My father once told me that the art of receiving a compliment is, of all things, the sign of a civilized man. He died soon afterwards, leaving my education in this important matter sadly incomplete; I’m only glad that, on this, the occasion of the rarest compliment he ever could have dreamed of, that he isn’t here to see his son so publicly at a loss. In receiving a compliment, or in trying to, the words are all worn out by now. They’re polluted by ham and corn. And, when you try to scratch around for some new ones, it’s just an exercise in empty cleverness. What I feel this evening, is not very clever. it’s the very opposite of emptiness. The corny old phrase is the only one I know to say it: my heart is full; with a full heart, with all of it, I thank you. This is Samuel Johnson, on the subject of what he calls contrarieties: “there are goods, so opposed that we cannot seize both, and, in trying, fail to seize either. Flatter not yourself, he says, with contrarieties. Of the blessings set before you, make your choice. No man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source, and from the mouth of the nile.” For this business of contrarieties has to do with us. With you, who are paying me this compliment, and for me, who has strayed so far from this hometown of ours. Not that I am alone in this, or unique, I am never that; but there are a few of us left in this conglomerated world of us who still trudge stubbornly along this lonely rocky road; and this is in fact our contrariety. We don’t move nearly as fast as our cousins on the freeway; we don’t even get as much accomplished just as the family sized farm can’t possibly raise as many crops or get as much profit as the agricultural factory of today. What we do come up with has no special right to call itself better it’s just.. different. No if there’s any excuse for us it all, it’s that we’re simply following the old American tradition of the maverick, and we are a vanishing breed. This honor I can only accept in the name of all the mavericks. And also, as a tribute to the generosity of all the rest of you; to the givers, to the ones with fixed addresses. A maverick may go his own way but he doesn’t think that it’s the only way, or ever claim that it’s the best one, except maybe for himself. And don’t imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy-o is claiming to be free. It’s just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work (in other words I’m crazy). But not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it’s a fact that many of the films you’ve seen tonight could never have been made otherwise. Or, if otherwise, well, they might have been better, but certainly they wouldn’t have been mine. The truth is I don’t believe that this great evening would ever have brightened my life if it wasn’t for this: my own, particular, contrariety. Let us raise our cups, then, standing as some of us do on opposite ends of the river, to what really matters to us all: to our crazy, beloved profession, to the movies — to good movies, to every possible kind.“
„I think I made essentially a mistake in staying in movies but it’s a mistake I can’t regret because it’s like saying I shouldn’t have stayed married to that woman but I did because I love her. I would have been more successful if I hadn’t been married to her, you know. I would have been more successful if I’d left movies immediately, stayed in the theatre, gone into politics, written, anything. I’ve wasted a greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox which is a movie. And I’ve spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. I’ts about two percent movie-making and ninety-eight percent hustling. It’s no way to spend a life.“
„Don’t let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons“
„You don’t know what I’m up against. Because it’s full of, of, of things that are only correct because they’re grammatical, but they’re tough on the ear, you see. This is a very wearying one. It’s unpleasant to read. Unrewarding. “Because Findus freeze the cod at sea, and then add a crumb-crisp” Ooh, “crumb-crisp coating.” Ahh, that’s tough, “crumb-crisp coating.” I think, no, because of the way it’s written, you need to break it up, because it’s not, it’s not as conversationally written.“
„As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it’s the aspect.“
„I spend… twenty times more for you people than any other commercial I’ve ever made. You are such pests! Now what is it you want? In your… depths of your ignorance, what is it you want? Whatever it is you want, I can’t deliver, ’cause I just don’t see it.“
„This theatre is your theatre. You are responsible for its creation and its progress.“
„I have only one real enemy in my life that I know about, and that is John Houseman. Everything begins and ends with that hostility behind the mandarin benevolence.“
„The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.“
„One should make movies innocently — the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden…Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D. W. Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody.“
„A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens.“
„We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes…“
„That doesn’t make any sense. Sorry. There’s no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with “in” and emphasize it. Get me a jury and show me how you can say “In July” and I’ll go down on you. That’s just idiotic, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. It’s just stupid… “In July”; I’d love to know how you emphasize “In” in “In July.”“