I get out of the taxi and it's probably the only city which in reality looks better than on the postcards, New York.
When you make a film, you realize that the audience will be powerless to stop it or flip back to refresh their memories or skip the boring parts. They are at the mercy of your storytelling.
I worked with Jack Nitzsche for 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' and we'd booked a symphony orchestra. He dismissed them and came with a little man who poured water into glasses of different sizes to make a glass harmonica. And most of the music for the film was that - with some Indian flutes and some drums.
When I entered the film school at the Prague Academy in the '50s, it was the hardest time in the Communist countries. The ideological control of the society was almost absolute.
It's not a lighthearted decision to change your language, your country, your citizenship, and come to a world where you don't know anybody, to leave a place where you've had opportunities to build friendships from childhood. That's quite a big decision to make.
First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined.
Holocaust films will be made and should be made as long as we can't understand what makes people so cruel to each other.
You either have commercial pressure or ideological pressure. I prefer commercial pressure; otherwise, you can be at the mercy of one or two idiots.
You know what happened, you know, in 1938: France, England, you know, just sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.
Milan Kundera was my literature professor. He's a Francophile, so he made us read French novels like 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses,' which I made a version of many years later as 'Valmont.'
I think if I tried very hard, I could do a novel or a play, a poem. I could possibly paint a picture, but I know I can't write music. And still, it is the most accessible of all arts, as you know when you hear a tune.
Mediocrity never goes away - but neither, I hope, do those who are willing to challenge it.
I don't mind getting involved in a risky project as long as I don't have to stay married to it if the script turns out lousy.
Humor was not important only for me, humor was important for this nation for centuries, to survive, you know.
The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself.
I tell you, in my opinion, the cornerstone of democracy is free press - that's the cornerstone.
So I left with Jean Claude and went to Paris, so when the Russians came to Prague, I was in Paris.
I think everybody dreamt somehow to make a film in Hollywood, you know.
And everything is controlled and everybody is a member of some committee, because then their watchdogs placed in the committees can control everything, what this person says or how this person think(s), you know.
