Nature repeats itself, but it never starts from the beginning.
Nicolas Roeg
You make the movie through the cinematography - it sounds quite a simple idea, but it was like a huge revelation to me.
And later I thought, I can't think how anyone can become a director without learning the craft of cinematography.
Fear has many faces.
Any change in form produces a fear of change, and that has accelerated. Marketing is the death of invention, because marketing deals with the familiar.
The great difference between screen acting and theatre acting is that screen acting is about reacting - 75% of the time, great screen actors are great reactors.
When I went to the cinema as a boy, when I saw a war film, I thought the general was the star, and that Cary Grant was an extra. I had no idea about the structure of film, but I loved going to the cinema.
When you admire someone's work, you are amazed by who you think they are.
We all have our beliefs or our agnosticism.
I hate it when people talk about Tony Curtis and say: 'His real name was Bernie Schwartz... ' That was just the name that he was given at birth. It's not the person he lived his life with, and became.
You can't hide in life. We are all being watched by some larger vision.
Marketing is such a key issue; in fact, the marketing department is often involved in the approval of scripts now.
Tony Curtis was a joy to work with. He had a curious innocence that is very young and wise at the same time.
They think something's gone wrong, but in Don't Look Now, for instance, one scene was made by a mistake. It's the scene where Donald Sutherland goes to look for the policeman who's investigating the two women.
Any cuts that are done to any film, they're usually things that have some personal resonance for whoever has got permission to cut it and feels they should. But it has very little to do with the actual weight, the truth, of the piece.
Mirrors are the essence of movies.
I think the big studios shaped and formed the artists that they put under contract.
I was very glad later when I was directing that I wasn't in the hands of a cinematographer and hoping that he would do it well. I would know what he was doing, and we could discuss how that scene would look.
I love that perhaps we don't see the things that are there because we have no yardstick to see things by, to compare them.
I've always loved the future. But I must say the future changes a lot quicker than it used to. An era used to last thirty or forty years - now we're lucky if it's five.
Our memory and the movies keep movie stars alive for us, and Tony Curtis is still a star.
'Puffball' is a love story... no, it's a life story.
There's horror in your life, believe me, whether it's coming, or you've just been lucky to miss it today.
I've always thought there was something very marvelous and magical about mirrors, and that they are connected to memory as well.
People are mistaken to view cinema as some sort of gimmick. It's very much ingrained in the ways in which we understand each other.
Some people are very lucky, and have the story in their heads. I've never storyboarded anything. I like the idea of chance. What makes God laugh is people who make plans.
Movies are not scripts - movies are films; they're not books, they're not the theatre.
You cannot intellectualize yourself out of obsession. You cannot cure yourself of it.
Critics reach that age when it is as valuable and daring to hold a negative opinion as it is for a positive. We learn and understand from both.
I've been told my movies are difficult to market.
When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he'd made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, 'Well, they've all been done before. There are so many blooming books in the world - why should I write another one?'
But in marketing, the familiar is everything, and that is controlled by the studio. That is reaching its apogee now.
Children's finger-painting came under the arts, but movies didn't.
In life, we all learn from everyone.
Marketing is a very good thing, but it shouldn't control everything. It should be the tool, not that which dictates.
The rules are learnt in order to be broken, but if you don't know them, then something is missing.
There was a village watercolour society and they'd come and paint in my field. I watched them from the window, the way they would struggle this way and that to find the perfect moment. God has made every angle on that beautiful, and I felt that tremendously.
Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.
I imagine if aliens came down to Earth, they'd actually be quite tall; people seem to get everything right about extraterrestrials but the size!
I've always admired the tradition of storytellers who sat in the public market and told their stories to gathered crowds. They'd start with a single premise and talk for hours - the notion of one story, ever-changing but never-ending.
There's no one 'right' way of making a science fiction movie; there's no one way of making any kind of movie, really!
Oh, some of my films have been attacked with absolute vitriol!
I was always a bit arty-farty as a boy. 'Come on, Mr. Arty-Farty,' my sister used to say to me.
I came up the old-fashioned way - tea boy, cutter, focus-puller, cinematographer - but I wasn't myself old-fashioned.
Film remains completely mystical and mysterious to me.
When a book is just a plot, you know, two men fight for the love of a woman in a wild frontier, I immediately ask, 'Why?'
A lot of my movies have come to be thought about only years after the fact, and I'm sad about that but also happy about it in a way, as it's given them longevity.
When I look around, I begin to understand what Socrates meant when he said, 'How much there is in the world I do not want.'
My father was an extraordinary man.
I don't look back on any film I've done with fondness or pride.
