Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.
Martin Scorsese
You never know how much time you have left.
Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.
There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.
And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things.
When I'm making a film, I'm the audience.
If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?
My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else.
Food tells you everything about the way people live and who they are.
Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good.
When I was growing up, I don't remember being told that America was created so that everyone could get rich. I remember being told it was about opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit.
I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.
The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.
There are two kinds of power you have to fight. The first is the money, and that's just our system. The other is the people close around you, knowing when to accept their criticism, knowing when to say no.
Eradicating a religion of kindness is, I think, a terrible thing for the Chinese to attempt.
Sometimes when you're heavy into the shooting or editing of a picture, you get to the point where you don't know if you could ever do it again.
Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you're working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience.
There must be people who remember World War II and the Holocaust who can help us get out of this rut.
Very often I've known people who wouldn't say a word to each other, but they'd go to see movies together and experience life that way.
If I'm not complaining, I'm not having a good time, hah hah!
I grew up in the Lower East Side, an Italian American - more Sicilian, actually.
I mean, music totally comes from your soul.
You don't make pictures for Oscars.
I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.
Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.
More personal films, you could make them, but your budgets would be cut down.
My father had this mythological sense of the old New York, and he used to tell me stories about these old gangs, particularly the Forty Thieves in the Fourth Ward.
It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily.
You make a deal. You figure out how much sin you can live with.
I go through periods, usually when I'm editing and shooting, of seeing only old films.
I'm re-energized by being around people who mean a lot to me.
Death comes in a flash, and that's the truth of it, the person's gone in less than 24 frames of film.
I'm going to be 60, and I'm almost used to myself.
A lot of what I'm obsessed with is the relationship and the dynamics between people and the family, particularly brothers and their father.
The most important thing is, how can I move forward towards something that I can't articulate, that is new in storytelling with moving images and sound?
I'm sad to see celluloid go, there's no doubt. But, you know, nitrate went, by the way, in 1971. If you ever saw a nitrate print of a silent film and then saw an acetate print, you'd see a big difference, but nobody remembers anymore. The acetate print is what we have. Maybe. Now it's digital.
Film in the 20th century, it's the American art form, like jazz.
The term 'giant' is used too often to describe artists. But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.
It did remind me of something out of Greek mythology - the richest king who gets everything he wants, but ultimately his family has a curse on it from the Gods.
People have to start talking to know more about other cultures and to understand each other.
I don't think there's a subject matter that can't absorb 3-D; that can't tolerate the addition of depth as a storytelling technique.
I was born in 1942, so I was mainly aware of Howard Hughes' name on RKO Radio Pictures.
If everything moves along and there are no major catastrophes we're basically headed towards holograms.
I always say that I've been in a bad mood for maybe 35 years now. I try to lighten it up, but that's what comes out when you get me on camera.
I happen to like vampires more than zombies.
Well, I think in my own work the subject matter usually deals with characters I know, aspects of myself, friends of mine - that sort of thing.
It's interesting that these themes of crime and political corruption are always relevant.
People say you should do it this way, someone else suggests that, yes, there's financing, but maybe you should use this actor. And there are the threats, at the end - if you don't do it this way, you'll lose your box office; if you don't do it that way, you'll never get financed again... 35, 40 years of this, you get beat up.
I always wanted to make a film that had this sort of Chinese-box effect, in which you keep opening it up and opening it up, and finally at the end you're at the beginning.
The young people today are the 21st century.
