Drama is easy. Comedy's hard.
Peter Bogdanovich
I started acting in 'The Sopranos' around 1999 and 2000. I did that for six years. That was quite a job, and I loved it.
Comedy has to be built carefully.
Comedy is the hardest thing to get right. I remember a joke we did in 'What's Up, Doc?' that didn't get a single laugh. So we moved the shot a foot-and-a-half to one side, and all of a sudden, the laugh was there. It drives you crazy; the balance is so delicate.
'Mask' wasn't the version that I wanted when it was originally released. It made money, but it would have made a lot more money. My version was a lot less depressing - tragic, but a lot less depressing.
Marlon Brando changed everything for actors. After him, everyone wanted to be Marlon. No one wanted to be a type: they all wanted to display versatility in every role.
'Jaws' was the first A-list picture that was released like an exploitation picture. They made a lot of money with that picture because they could save a lot of money on advertising. Instead of having a full-page ad in 'The New York Times' for one theater, they had it for 100 theaters.
For a while, all the studios had their art-house divisions, but that went by the by pretty quickly. Now, they're really focusing on these huge blockbusters, spending a fortune on cartoon pictures and comic-strip movies and superhero movies, and they aren't making pictures like 'How Green Was My Valley,' which was an Oscar winner in its day.
The first time I met Brando was on a street corner. I was 14. He was walking down the street, and I saw him coming, and I thought, 'It's Marlon Brando.' And he was wearing what turned out to be his outfit from 'On the Waterfront,' because he was shooting.
I prefer a monogamous relationship if I can find one.
My father, who was a good deal older than my mother, had basically grown up with silent films; sound didn't arrive until he was 30 years old. So he took me to see silent pictures at MoMA when I was 5 or 6 years old.
One of the things that wrong with pictures today, I think, is that so many of the people making them started out wanting to.
But at a certain point, and I don't really know... people have asked me this. I don't know exactly what it was that pushed me towards directing, but I think it was a naive notion that if I directed I would be able to play all the roles. A kind of greed.
The actors are in control, getting outrageous amounts of money. The reason they're getting this kind of money is because the studios don't know what else to do. They don't have a clue about what to do except to pay an actor a lot of money.
You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.
I could hardly believe that she really existed, that she wasn't a dream. There was something miraculous about Dorothy Stratten.
I had been an abject fan of Martin and Lewis when I was a kid. I just thought they were terribly funny. None of their movies captured the kind of chemistry they really had.
I certainly had an arrogant streak. And I certainly was defensive in certain cases. Maybe I'm still arrogant, but I try not to be.
Love is a lot more complicated than people think.
I don't know how you get to be 40 without having a whole bunch of regrets.
I was offered 'Popeye,' which Robert Altman made. They offered me $2 million to direct that, which was good money. I wasn't interested in it. I don't like that kind of movie.
Cher and I didn't get along that well.
I direct as an actor. Many times, I will say, 'Let me try this.' And I'll walk the scene through and see what I can tell the actor about it. I don't know what to tell him until I've actually tried it and seen what the problem is.
I think 'Paper Moon' is a comedy-drama. 'What's Up, Doc?' was the most severe comedy, but my favorite film of my own is 'They All Laughed,' which is a kind of bittersweet comedy.
During the Hollywood studio system, they looked for people who were unusual. The stars had peculiarities.
I've stopped caring what people think.
When I was younger, all my friends were older - John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. I loved talking to those people.
I loved Keaton. In fact, when I made the chase sequence in 'What's Up, Doc,' I said, 'This is a Buster Keaton chase.'
The end of the studio system signalled the end of the great screen stars. They were the sort of actors who brought their own charismatic personas to each role they played. Audiences felt as if they knew them immediately every time they watched one of their movies.
