The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.
No matter how old you get, if you can keep the desire to be creative, you're keeping the man-child alive.
I won't call my work entertainment. It's exploring. It's asking questions of people, constantly. 'How much do you feel? How much do you know? Are you aware of this? Can you cope with this?' A good movie will ask you questions you don't already know the answers to. Why would I want to make a film about something I already understand?
I have a one-track mind. That's all that I'm interested in - love. And the lack of it. When it stops.
I think I probably have the philosophy of a poor man. You know, like maybe I'd steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes.
As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail.
You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all.
My parents allowed their two sons to be individuals. My family was a wild and wonderful place, with lots of friends and neighbors visiting and talking loud and eating loud and nobody telling the children to be quiet or putting them down.
You can defeat fear through humor, through pain, through honesty, bravery, intuition, and through love in the truest sense.
People don't know what they are doing most of the time. They don't know what they want. It's only in 'the movies' that they know what their problems are and have game plans to deal with them.
'Faces' became more than a film. It became a way of life, a film against the authorities and the powers that prevent people from expressing themselves the way they want to, something that can't be done in America, that can't be done without money.
I'm a great believer in spontaneity because I think planning is the most destructive thing in the world.
You can fail in films because you don't have the talent, or you have too much humility, or you lack ferociousness. I'm a gangster. If I want something, I'll grab it.
My mother and father were never frightened of anything. They always felt that they should go through life happily and without fear, and they did that. And it was a great boon to my brother and myself.
The idea of love as a mysterious, undiscovered world has come to have no place in our innermost imagination.
I think people are very stiff. Money makes people stiff, and we want it, and we have to pay the penalty. I never agreed with stiffness. I think people have an understanding of what their life is. I define success by being a realist and not humiliating people. I'm a revolutionary - but not in the political sense.
I would put my pictures up against anybody's in this world. Certainly in my own day I bow to no one. I don't think there's another director in the world who works harder to make better films than I do.
We only have two hours to change people's lives.
I think I'm probably one of the worst directors around, but I do have an interest in my fellow man.
The camera is the slave to the actor.
