35 quotes found
"I thought I might die. But then I thought, 'Other people have made it through these things before'. I kept my eyes on the lights on shore and kept swimming."
"I don’t know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in all the John Ford Westerns over the years"
"Having the security of being in a series week in, week out gives you great flexibility; you can experience with yourself, try a different scene different ways. If you make a mistake one week, you can look at it and say, 'Well, I won't do that again,' and you're still on the air next week."
"There's only one way to have a happy marriage and as soon as I learn what it is I'll get married again."
"I've actually had people come up to me and ask me to autograph their guns."
"With that kind of money, I could have invaded some country."
"Everybody wonders why I continue working at this stage. I keep working because there's always new stories. … And as long as people want me to tell them, I'll be there doing them."
"In recent times it just seems that women have been relegated to either romantic roles or fluff pieces. So the appeal, for me, is to make a picture about a real woman."
"I never thought it was a good idea for attorneys to be president, anyway. ... I think it is maybe time -- what do you think -- for maybe a businessman. How about that? A stellar businessman."
"[...] secretly everybody's getting tired of political correctness, kissing up. That's the kiss-ass generation we're in right now. We're really in a pussy generation. Everybody's walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff."
"'Don't just do something, stand there.' Gary Cooper wasn't afraid to do nothing."
"I wanted to play it with an economy of words and create this whole feeling through attitude and movement. It was just the kind of character I had envisioned for a long time, keep to the mystery and allude to what happened in the past. It came about after the frustration of doing Rawhide for so long. I felt the less he said the stronger he became and the more he grew in the imagination of the audience."
"Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino play losers very well. But my audience like to be in there vicariously with a winner. That isn't always popular with critics. My characters have sensitivity and vulnerabilities, but they're still winners. I don't pretend to understand losers. When I read a script about a loser I think of people in life who are losers and they seem to want it that way. It's a compulsive philosophy with them. Winners tell themselves, I'm as bright as the next person. I can do it. Nothing can stop me."
"Westerns. A period gone by, the pioneer, the loner operating by himself, without benefit of society. It usually has something to do with some sort of vengeance; he takes care of the vengeance himself, doesn't call the police. Like Robin Hood. It's the last masculine frontier. Romantic myth. I guess, though it's hard to think about anything romantic today. In a Western you can think, Jesus, there was a time when man was alone, on horseback, out there where man hasn't spoiled the land yet."
"This is one politician who doesn't have ambitions to leave Carmel."
"The roles that Eastwood has played, and the films that he has directed, cannot be disentangled from the nature of the American culture of the last quarter century, its fantasies and its realities."
"Lazy, and would cost you a morning. I never started a day with Clint Eastwood in the first scene, because you knew he was gonna be late, at least a half hour or an hour."
"At that time I needed a mask rather than an actor, and Eastwood had only two facial expressions: one with the hat and one without it."
"It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement. Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s]. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences. As the younger, more left-leaning "New Hollywood" generation swept into the industry in the late '60s and '70s, this older group of Hollywood conservatives faded away, never to be replaced. Except for a brief period in the '80s when the Reagan Presidency led to a conservative reengagement with film—with popular stars like Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger making macho, patriotic action films—conservatives appeared to abandon popular culture altogether. In the wake of this retreat, conservative failure to engage with Hollywood now appears to have been recast by today's East Coast conservative establishment into a generalized opposition toward film and popular culture itself. In the early '90s, conservative film critic Michael Medved codified this oppositional feeling toward Hollywood in his best-selling book Hollywood vs. America."
"He just made my day. What a guy."
"I've always been fairly confident in what I feel and think. And part of that I think is coming from the Bay Area, where, you know, being an individual was very celebrated. Our culture of the Bay Area is a place where you want to be different. You want to be seen. You want to be heard. You want—there, conformity is the worst thing that you could aspire to."
"We've all grown up with the idea that gunning a man down is just fun and games. All of us, as kids, played cops and robbers, with toy pistols or pointing a finger at somebody and saying, "Bang, Bang. You're dead!" Both the movies and television have perpetuated the idea that shooting a man is clean and quick and simple, and when he falls down there is only a small hole, or a blood-stain, to show how he died. Well, killing a man isn't clean and quick and simple. It's bloody and awful. And maybe if enough people come to realize that shooting somebody isn't just fun and games maybe we'll get somewhere about violence on the screen in the first place. [...] No, I don't like violence. In fact, when I look at the film myself, I find it unbearable. I don't think I'll be able to see it again for five years."
"The whole underside of our society has always been violence and still is. Churches, laws--everybody seems to think that man is a noble savage. But he's only an animal. A meat-eating, talking animal. Recognize it. He also has grace and love and beauty. But don't say to me we're not violent."
"I did this one script for ' that turned down--said it was a piece of shit! I knew it was one of the best things I'd written, so I took it back and reworked it and at Four Star bought it as a pilot for '. Dick Powell was really a fine gentleman and the eagle behind Four Star's success; he helped me a great deal. I didn't direct the first Rifleman; did that. I just wrote it. I did direct four of them before I left, however. The first one I directed I also wrote, called "The Marshal." It was the episode that brought in as the reformed drunk who became the marshal--a part he played for five years."
"I walked from the series because Jules Levy and that group had taken over my initial concept and perverted it into pap. They wouldn't let Johnny grow up; they refused to let it be the story of a boy who grows to manhood learning what it's all about."
"The Losers was a funny show. We had and locked up for a series with it until Tom McDermott wouldn't pay Lee's price. Well, after the show continued to draw a large segment of the audience around the sixth time out, McDermott called Lee and raised the ante to something like a million dollars and Lee told him to go stick it up his ass! I've always liked Lee for that--it cost me a lot of money at the time but I would've done the same thing in Lee's place."
"Sam and I work well together. I would go to and from work with him, so we would have that extra time to talk with each other—that kind of thing is very unusual, but I think something comes of that proximity."
"Sam's like a fight trainer. He shapes you up, he psyches you, he draws everything out of you. He's subtle, though, yet baroque, and I want to get into that baroqueness. Like the other day, during a scene in which I was supposed to be answering the door and registering surprise. Well, it was the end of the day and I wasn't acting very surprised, so he smashes a beer bottle behind me, right out of camera range. I mean, Christ, I nearly jumped out of my skin. But he got what he wanted."
"[T]he story [...] was really more representative of how Sam thought than any picture except Ride the High Country. He liked to laugh at things, if no one was around to catch him at it."
"I said to him, "Well, I'm just trying to find out who Hildy is, and it was out in the open, in the western street, and he yelled at me, "She's you!" You know? Like, in such a way as to say, "You're the whore," you know? He was not very nice. And he did that to men to rile them, too. There have been many men who have done things to get even with Sam, because he had no tact."
"It would've been nicer if he didn't pose as he did, and sit behind sunglasses that have mirrors on them so that no one could see his eyes. Because he was such a liar, he was afraid to get caught, because if you look in someone's eyes deeply enough, you can tell they're lying. So he was afraid of that; he wouldn't let anyone see his eyes."
"His hatred, his loneliness, whatever that he had, his angst, he could not let it go. He had to try to drown it in alcohol. But that's like pouring gasoline on a fire. But he just would not stop. And it was common sense that he should do that, so I'm not sure that he had common sense. He would make people mad and cause fights, and then run, hide; he wouldn't be there. He would, you know, take a punch here or there, but he was not a fighter. He was a little, bitty guy. You could deck him with one punch. I probably could have, you know?"
"Ignore the glass ceiling and do your work. If you’re focusing on the glass ceiling, focusing on what you don’t have, focusing on the limitations, then you will be limited."
"So I came to realize that those dreams I'd been dreaming, what was the problem, what was so off, what was the error. It's cuz the dreams are too small. If your dream only includes you, it's too small. If that dream is just about the thing you want to accomplish, and you don't even know why you want it, I mean it's too small. It may take your attention, but you're not really winning. You may achieve it, but you're not growing from it. You're just going from thing to thing. It may look like success from the outside but if you don't even truly know how you're doing it, then your cause and effect will be off and you're not gonna be fully truly living your dreams."
"You’ve got Brahmins profiteering at the expense of the Indian people. We need that to stop."