If everybody loves you, you must be doing something wrong. It means there's no button being pushed... The only way that everybody loves you is toward the end of your career.
James Gray
The key to humor is often self-loathing or sarcasm. In a sense, that's how self-loathing is made palatable.
At Ellis Island, I mean, you didn't go there if you arrived in first class. It was only the poorest, the people in the worst shape.
'Apocalypse Now' poses questions without any attempt to provide definitive answers, and the film's profound ambiguities are integral to its enduring magic.
Melodrama and melodramatic are not the same thing, and often people make the mistake of confusing the two.
Anyone who starts badmouthing Latino immigrants is not only a racist but ignorant. You need to refer them to what was written about the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, any group you want.
At least in America, the narrative is I'm a Cannes favorite. But, in fact, I've had my best experience in Venice, both with the audience and the jury.
I don't envy the job of people who have to watch five movies a day - that's insane.
As ugly an admission as this is, I met my wife at a party, and if I had been to the same party and she were dressed in different clothes, I might never have talked to her. She might have projected something that I found distasteful, even if she otherwise looked exactly the same - a beautiful woman to me.
Sean Penn has announced his retirement from acting about 72 times.
I have no athletic skills whatsoever. I'm just literally incompetent.
At a certain point, you have to kind of realize that greatness is a messy thing.
I live up Laurel Canyon, and if I want to walk with my son, I have to drive to the park, which is so insane to me.
My wife thinks I have an obsession with social class. So I guess I have an obsession with social class. It probably stems from feeling like an outcast.
Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance.
The life of a film is very strange. Once the film is done, you wish you could forget about it and move on.
I had written 'Two Lovers' before we started shooting 'We Own the Night.'
I began to see cinema as the perfect combination of so many wonderful art forms - painting, photography, music, dance, theater.
The system is not really particularly amenable to filmmakers who write and direct their own work. It's much more about the studio already having a property that has a marketable concept and then hiring the director on board.
I grew up in a semi-attached row house in Queens in New York. And my family and my grandparents and my father's from Brooklyn, and so you're essentially an outer boroughs kid, you're growing up.
It's very difficult to put your finger on why a certain actor or actress will capture your attention, and you'll think they're right for a role. There's an essence to a person.
The state of being in love is so inherently preposterous. It usually lends itself to romantic comedy. I think we've all been there.
The decision about digital or film is going to be made for us. I think the answer is that film is gonna be gone, although I think it'll make a comeback; it'll be like vinyl records or something.
The first movie, I was 23; I thought I knew everything, but my ego soon took an irrevocable blow.
All I can say is sometimes home gets burned into your occipital lobe, and it can't leave you, and there's always that longing.
If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.
Film is better than digital in every way. It has better contrast ratio, better blacks, and better color reproduction. It's a more organic image, which is more the way your eyes see.
It's weird, because American films in the 1930s and '40s, particularly melodramas, were made for woman, from Bette Davis to Joan Crawford to Barbara Stanwyck to Katherine Hepburn, and for some reason we've taken a step backward in this sense.
If you read about the astronauts who went to the moon - the 12 who walked on it, and the others who orbited - all suffered serious mental trauma of one kind or another.
I'm just not willing to give up on myself. If I'm going to fail, then I want to fail to the limits of my talent.
My wife and I had been to the genetic counselor; my wife is not Jewish - she's the shiksha goddess type - and was negative for everything. But I was positive. I carried the gene for three genetic disorders, which, if she had been positive for, we would have passed down to the child.
I went to see 'Star Trek Into Darkness,' and J.J. Abrams, who's a friend of mine, made this film, and I went to see it at the premiere. Believe it or not, I was really blown away by the comic timing of it.
Really, what I'm doing is an attempt to continue the best work of the people I adore: Francis Coppola and Scorsese and Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick and those amazing directors whose work I grew up with and loved.
I'm telling you, every film I've ever made has been hated by the U.K. critics.
Time can be very good or very cruel to films.
The key to acting - from what little I know about that wonderful craft - is listening, and interacting with the other person in order to achieve magic. One way to do that is almost to provoke.
To the extent that independent means you're willing to attempt to put your own ideas, personality, and commitment to the material on screen, then of course I hope I'm independent until the day I die.
When I was quite young, I dreamed of being a painter.
My grandparents, they came through Ellis Island in 1923, and you know, I'd heard all the stories.
William Atherton has a very different acting style to Bonnie Bedelia; she has a very different style than Bruce Willis.
I continually marvel at people who can make films that reach five hundred million people. How do you do that? Everybody's different - I don't know how that works.
The corporate system dictates what gets made, and the movies are so bad because of the economic structure of Hollywood. The big business takeover of Hollywood is at fault rather than American storytellers - it's what keeps textured movies from getting made.
I am an Ashkenazi Jew, and there are a whole host of genetic disorders that only Ashkenazi Jews have. I don't know if you know this, but 16 or 17 disorders that we carry the gene for.
My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.
There's virtually nothing made up in 'The Immigrant.' So much of the film came from somewhere in my family's past. All the details are from my own family.
I think I'm a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies; the American mainstream left me.
Unfortunately for critics and audiences alike, I have made several films, and some films with really terrific actors. And I say this at my own peril, but Marion Cotillard is the best actor I've ever worked with.
I know this sounds phony, but I don't start out on a project going, 'I'm going to make an emotional work,' you know what I mean? You try to tell the story directly and honestly and with passion.
What a director really does is set the emotional temperature and the mood and the level, amount, or lack of, distance between the action and the character, and the character and the audience.
The idea that the family is this locus of support but can also hold you back and keep you down makes for good drama.
