Dissections

"The central conflict of the film is interior, which made it difficult to dramatize. Margaret finds out she’s pregnant again and is not sure how she feels about having a third child. She’s torn between that primal urge to mother, and her desire for a fulfilling career of her own. And what was most interesting to me is that the movie didn’t come down on either side. In fact, it was truly a women’s lib picture because it was about a woman’s right to choose which path was right for her, and that also meant she had the right to choose whether or not to have a baby. 

"The movie asked a very important question: Why is the role of a mother so undervalued in our society? It’s a very important job ... molding the next generation. But some women who had no other profession than housewife thought less of themselves than they should ... just like Margaret, who felt inadequate next to her husband’s female colleagues. The whole point of the film was to empower women and remind them of their worth, no matter whether they chose to work inside or outside the home ... or both."

"[James Dean] did a thing that always attracts me: Не wasn't polite to me. He made me feel he wasn't straining to butter me up, that he had a real sense of himself. When I met him, he said, 'I'll take you for a ride on my motorbike.' It was very hard for him to talk, and riding me on the back of his motorbike, which I did like a damn fool around the streets of New York, was his way of communicating with me. He had his own way, and I thought he was perfect for the part. I thought he was an extreme grotesque of a boy, a twisted boy. As I got to know his father, as I got to know about his family, I learned that he had been, in fact, twisted by the denial of love."

"The great thing about FAHRENHEIT 451 as a film is that it allows you choices; it allows you imagination. That ending is commensurate with the ending of CITIZEN KANE, where you get that total release which comes from the very obvious device of throwing the sled with the name Rosebud on to the fire. It's a simplistic thing. It doesn't really sum up the life of this rich man so completely, but in many ways it does. We need something to say, 'Oh yes, that boy playing in the snow. If he'd only known.' In many ways we want to keep him playing there a little while longer before he goes out to be devoured by the world and himself and circumstance. 

This beautiful ending on Truffaut's film was an accident. It began to snow, and somebody said let's pack up and go back to the studio, but Truffaut had enough brains to say, 'No, let's stay and use the snow. Let it fall.' So you've got that beautiful thing of the old man dying and teaching his son the book. Yes, it's simplistic! Yes, it's ridiculous! Yes, it's romantic! People don't go around speaking books out loud in parts. It's stupid to show all those people doing it, but that's Mankind in that part. It's a supermetaphor. You're not supposed to take a realistic view."

"I do respect a director such as [William] Friedkin, who suddenly is confronted with a scene of a party going on, and an eight-year-old girl joins the party and pees on the carpet. That's what you have to shoot. That's just a day's work. Where do you put the camera? It is not easy. I can do a chase sequence. I can do any goddamned thing. But an eight-year-old girl peeing during a party, that's a new one. It requires a different technique. It is this kind of never-seen-before that makes for this type of enormous box office. But I think THE EXORCIST is good, riveting picturemaking. I also think that once you make up your mind to make a picture like this you've got to give it both knees, because it is not going to be in great taste or very subtle. If you do it, then do it. That's Sam Peckinpah's technique, the man who gives it three knees."

"Hitchcock once said to me: 'Never use an establishing shot to establish.' Why? 'Because it has no dramatic meaning. Only use it when it has dramatic meaning in the story.' I took that advice on [THE LAST] PICTURE SHOW, for example, in Sam's funeral scene. It's all played in very close shots until the last shot, when Ellen Burstyn's character walks away, and we drop back and show what would normally be an establishing shot, with the great open sky above them. It has much more power at that point because you're invested emotionally."

"People take me too damn serious. I mean, I have sung songs about the darker forces, but I’ve also written songs about everything across the spectrum from pollution to politics to war to poverty to happiness to a boy meets girl. People go, ‘Oh, Ozzy Osbourne. He bites the heads off things and pissed up the Alamo.’ I kinda feel typecast. [...] What I’ve desperately tried to get across is that if you think you know Ozzy Osbourne, you’re only scratching the surface because I don’t even know Ozzy Osbourne. I so often frequently surprise me, you know?"

"Maybe I was just born in the wrong era, man. I'm a bit of a throwback to the days of black and white movies. Those guys back then, they had a certain kind of directness about them. A lot of the screenplays, the plots were very simplistic - they gave rise to a type of anti-hero that maybe I suit better."

"I like all different kinds of cinema. There are no rules. Some abstract things don’t move me at all and some move me like crazy. Some straight-ahead movies don’t do anything for me, whereas others really light my fire. It’s cinema, it’s billions of elements. Cinema, they say, combines seven arts. It’s a very complete medium, so it shouldn’t stop you from going other places – if the ideas come along. Cinema is a mighty special, beautiful medium."

"There was never any question in my mind about [using a real boat]. All those trashy special effects and miniatures that you see in Hollywood movies have caused audiences to lose trust in their eyes. Here, in my film, they are given back trust in their own eyes. When the boat goes up the mountain, people look at the screen, looking for something to tell them it’s a trick, but it’s no trick. Instinctively, they sense it. An image like that gives you courage for your own dreams. It’s a film that will not have a remake. That man who is going to make this film again has to be born first. The mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria could have made this film."

“When you say that I haven’t lived through the war, you’re wrong. I lived through it, and I lived through it dramatically at times, and in a way I have suffered its consequences, as have many Spaniards. What I didn’t do was fight because I was 4 years old when the war began. But I lived through the war and I have violent and dramatic memories of it. There is no doubt at all that those years have left a profound mark on me and have taught the terrible lesson that there is nothing more horrible than a civil war. But I insist that I don’t think that my films can be interpreted as a function of my childhood. Of course as an auteur who tries to explain a series of things to himself, as happens to me, has to resort to personal experiences, but not just to his childhood experiences but to any type of experiences. My films are not deliberately autobiographical. I mean that there is no authorial intention to be revealed in them. My films, I think, are transpositions of my own or assimilated experiences, the product of readings, of images, of this or that thing. One of the problems that worries me the most is the lack of clarity there is in getting to a profound understanding of things. It worries me how the impressions, the memories, the facts that I now need vanish away. What I try to do through my films is simply to put a series of thoughts and images into an order.”