British Films

"James Nesbitt - Joe Griffin"

"[to Vika] The trouble with me is, I've got all the wrong feelings. But him! Oh, his feelings! They are just right, just perfect! He did it in cold blood, but now look at the man he has become! What is it like to kill a man," they all ask him? "Well, you have to understand..." And off he goes again, telling them all about this and that. But hats off to him, he's cracked it! He knows they all love to shake hands with a killer."

"[voiceover] I can do handshakes, Michael! And I can do victim. I can do handshake and victim both at the same time. But I've made a decision on this one. Reconciliation? You have no idea. A handshake? For killing my brother? For me taking the blame? 33 years of that? What do you think I am, a joke? If ever a man deserved a knife run through him, that scum of the earth. Truth and reconciliation? I'm going for revenge."

"[voiceover] She's been staring at me for 33 years, do you know that? What it's like? Your mother blaming you for 33 years? Three bullets went into his head. You'd know that, though. Did you know another one hit a picture of a cat on the wall? It wasn't me who broke that picture, I never got the blame for that one, and if it wasn't me who broke the picture on the wall, it wasn't me who killed my brother. I didn't kill him like she said I did. It was you. It was you in the car arriving at her house and shooting three bullets into her son's head, making her grieve the way she did, blaming me the way she did. Well, I'm the one in the car now, visiting you. I'm the one in the car now. I'm the one in the car now."

"[voiceover, about Alistair] Swanning around the world talking about your feelings. A ticket to paradise. For killing a man! I mean, where would he have been without me? 40 years in the factory in Lurgan making egg cartons like the rest of us. Aye, not him! He can make a living telling the Pope, and the Queen, the Dalai fucking Lama how it feels to kill a man. How it feels, the suffering I have, the burden I carry. Why should you get women in pastel shades and rosy perfumes giving you tea and buns and wine from fucking Chile, just so's you can tell them how it feels to be putting three bullets into my brother's head?"

"Get rid of me, Joe...so that when you wake up in the morning, it's not me in your head, it's your daughters. Don't give them me. Go home and tell them that you've killed me off. That I'm gone, forever. I'm nothing. Nothing. Go home and tell them that and live your life for them."

"For me to talk about the man I have become, you need to know about the man I was. I was fourteen when I joined the tartan gangs and I was fifteen when I joined the UVF. At that time, don't forget, there were riots on the streets every week; petrol bombs everyday, and that was just in our town. When you got home and switched on the TV, you could see what was happening in every other town as well, and it was like we were under siege. Fathers and brothers and friends were being killed in the streets, and the feeling was we had to do something. We're all in this together and we all have to do something. The thing you have to remember; what you have to understand, is the mindset. Once you have signed up to terror, and joined the organization; the group, your mind closes right down. It becomes only our story that matters, not their story - the Catholics. It's only *my* people that are being killed, and here suffering and that need looking after. Catholics being killed? Doesn't enter your head. And so when I went up to Sammy, our local commander, and told him I wanted to kill a Catholic man, it wasn't a wrong thing for me to do. In my head, it was the proper; the just; the fair; the good thing to do, and so, it was easy. When I got to the house, there was a boy in the street. I didn't expect him to be there, but, there he was. I only looked at him for a moment because I had a job to do, but if I had known that he was Jim's brother, I would have shot him as well. It was in the mindset. It was tit-for-tat, and perhaps one more - why not? That's what it was like. I was only seventeen. I'd seen my people fighting ever since I was a wee boy. You'd take sides with your friends as a boy, but we weren't just throwing stones over the fence - we were shooting guns. What I want to tell people; what society must do is to stop people getting to the point where they join the group. Because when you get to that point it's too late. No-one's gonna stop you. No-one's gonna change your mind. And once you're in, you will do anything. You will kill anyone on the other side, because it's right to do it. Once your man has joined the group, society has lost him. And what he needs to hear are voices on his own side, stopping him before he goes in. There were no voices on my side, not on my side of the town, not in my estate. No-one was telling me anything other than that killing is right. It was only in prison when I heard that other voice. And the Muslims now - you know the kids now are like I was then. They need to hear those voices now, stopping them from thinking that killing is good. They need their own people to say "no". That's where they need to hear it, and that's where I would put my money - on making those voices heard in every mosque in the country. When I got home my Mother and Father were watching the TV and it came on the news that the man I had shot was dead. I was so excited, I couldn't wait for when I would get my congratulations. Sammy was gonna come knocking at my door, he was going to lead me out into the street and proudly walk me into the bar, and everybody was gonna stand up and applaud. Me, I would have shot anyone for that. And that is why I talk to anybody who will listen now to tell them to stop boys like me thinking that to shoot an innocent and decent man in the head is a good thing."

"Isn’t God supposed to be good? Isn’t God supposed to love us? And does God want us to suffer? What if the answer to that question is yes? ’Cause I’m not sure that God particularly wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to be able to love and be loved. He wants us to grow up. I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he makes us the gift of suffering."

"Joseph Mazzello - Douglas Gresham"

"Edward Hardwicke - Warren "Warnie" Lewis"

"Debra Winger - Joy Gresham"

"Anthony Hopkins - C.S. "Jack" Lewis"

"Are you trying to be offensive, or merely stupid?"

"Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore, only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I’ve been given the choice. As a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal."

"I love you, Joy. I love you so much. You made me so happy. I didn't know I could be so happy."

"I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me."

"I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he makes us the gift of suffering. Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see we are like blocks of stone out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel which hurt us so much are what make us perfect."

"Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

"He comes; he sleeps; he goes. So the plot thickens."

"Fight me, I can take it. Even I cannot fight on both sides at once you know. At least I can but I’m liable to win."

"The most intense joy lies not in the having but in the desiring. The delight that never fades, the bliss that is eternal is only yours when what you most desire is just out of reach."

"A thousand years ago, the Crystal cracked. And here, far from the castle, the race of Mystics came to live in a dream of peace. Their ways were the gentle ways of natural wizards. Yet now there are only ten. A dying race, numbly rehearsing the ancient ways in a blur of forgetfulness. But today, the ritual gives no comfort. Today, the wisest of the Mystics lies dying. Today, they summon the one who must save them."

"I think it spoke to me so strongly when I first saw it because it set itself a very precise challenge: presenting a totally new world, which nonetheless has the capacity to make the viewer relate and respond to its characters' interactions. That sounds very simple, but as a storyteller I can reliably report that it's unutterably sophisticated."

"[T]he Skeksis will always be horribly memorable. I'm pretty sure the scene where the Chamberlain is attacked and defrocked by his sneering brothers gave me nightmares as a youngster."

"[F]or me the brilliance of the first film — the underlying reason that I hold it so highly — can be boiled down to two words: childlike wonder. Literally every character in that movie is a version of a child we'd all recognize. From the laid-back mystics — remember that high-functioning kid in every classroom who just stares dreamily out the window all day? — to the petulant and venal bullies of the villainous Skeksis. They're all cast as utterly original monsters, but they're very recognizable tropes once you know what you're looking for. This was a movie which introduced a whole new world, after all—not just some lazy Tolkien-esque fantasy rip-off, but a teeming, exotic, alien reality full of impossible life and delightfully weird wonders. The little piece of genius which underlies the movie is that the central characters are experiencing all this craziness for the first time, just like we the viewers."

"The original movie landed in 1982 and caused an immediate stir, being the first live-action flick which featured literally no human characters. I'm not sure the audiences of the day quite knew what to make of it. Critics expected it to fit tidily into the continuum of knowingly comedic Muppetry which had made the Henson name, and couldn't wrap their heads around this slice of totally earnest, unironic adventure which set its sights on nothing less than pure wonder. Is it sci-fi? Fantasy? A kids' flick?"

"It was not smooth at all, and it was because of me, not because of Jim. Jim should have ****in' fired me several times. Jim was extraordinarily patient. I was a young guy who wanted to make his mark in the world, and if I was the co-director, by God why wasn't I attending more meetings and why didn't I get more say in things? I had a problem of self-esteem and it came through that way. It was difficult for Jim, not for me. It was frustrating for me, but that was an unhealthy frustration. It worked because Jim was patient."

"This is Jim – he said, "Would you direct Dark Crystal with me?" and I said, "Why? I don't know how to direct. You could do it yourself. Why would you want me to direct with you?" He said, "Because it would be better." And that's all that mattered. He didn't care about the credit. He knew that he had some weaknesses and he felt that I had some strengths, and so we worked together that way."

"Jim didn't have a script – he didn't work that normal way. He wanted to have a laboratory of textures and designs and ideas and rehearsals. He had a story – but he wanted the script to work in conjunction with the laboratory of creating the characters."

"What Jim wanted to do, and it was totally his vision, was to get back to the darkness of the original Grimm’s fairy tales. He thought it was fine to scare children. He didn’t think it was healthy for children to always feel safe."

"They just couldn't get their head around the idea that the person who was doing The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie, things that were so light and joyful, that he himself would want to deviate from what he had been doing. It was really surprising to people and they expressed a lot of doubt about it. Then, the film did pretty well commercially and it also did very well internationally. This story has so many universal qualities such as good and evil, the characters are not American and they're not from any place in particular and so it worked around the world."

"The prep period for The Dark Crystal was really long, it was literally years because they had the world and the creatures developed before they ever had a firm storyline. The script for The Dark Crystal actually fell in place later than anything else and some of it was only during post-production."

"People talk about how look and feel of The Dark Crystal is so much more real than CGI but they also had no choice because there was no computer animation when The Dark Crystal was made. There were some optical effects, there were some composites that were hand done in the lab but there were no computer effects."

"We kind of look at it as the Henson Company's little Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings franchise. It truly has the ability to be explored in different geographical parts of that world, or different time periods of that world, and it's been so fun to expand the canon of The Dark Crystal. Now that we've got the ball rolling on that, it feels like that could continue indefinitely."

"For me, watching his performances of Aughra and the Chamberlain is incredible and I'm so moved by how he infused life into those characters. That's pure talent to really take an inanimate object and give it life so believably. It's still the core asset of this film."

"I think people, whether they are studied in puppetry or not, are going to love the artistic tapestry that’s up there. Some of the tiniest details in The Dark Crystal like when the Chamberlain’s eyelid starts to twitch, just make it feel so much more real, so much more alive."

"People shouldn't come expecting to see the Muppets because they are not here. This is something else."

"It's a rather dark vision, actually."

"I wanted to do a film where the creatures didn't look like us."

"I've always thought that science fiction films set in our world have always rung false."

"It's an adventure story. But it's definitely not in our world."

"The Dark Crystal (1982) is nothing if not a parable of Fall and Redemption..."

"The spiritual kernel of The Dark Crystal is heavily influenced by Seth. I've always felt that the idea of perfect beings split into a good mystic part and an evil materialistic part which are reunited after a long separation is Jim's response to the teachings of that book. Jim admitted that he didn't understand the book himself, and that everyone would understand it — or not understand it — in their own way. But he thought it opened up a whole different way of looking at reality, which I think was one of his goals in the making of The Dark Crystal."

"This weird UFO of a movie that didn't belong in the Eighties. It was ahead of its time and a little bit obsolete at the same time because it was done with puppets."

"The Dark Crystal is a movie I saw a little too young, it shocked me a little bit and never left my mind."

"From the very first in scoring the music for The Dark Crystal, I set out to find two melodic ideas — one for the Mystics, the other for the Skeksis. These two motifs, when counterpointed, fuse to become one, and in the Great Conjunction at the film’s climax, they join to become the central theme."

"It had always been our intention to create a tale with the weight of myth; a story that felt as though it had been told many times before in another land, another age, another world; a story whose profound, universal truth is revealed in the retelling. Since the movie continues to be used in philosophy, religion and metaphysics classes as well as in film seminars, we seem to have succeeded."

"The Dark Crystal is a difficult film to categorize, evaluate, and appreciate. For every positive thing one can say about it, a corresponding negative can be cited: It is a brilliantly conceived world... inhabited by less than compelling central characters; it is a marvel of technological achievement... all but undone by the limitations of technology; it is a very adult fantasy... that works best for undemanding adolescents; and, finally, it is a triumph of the puppeteer's art... which cannot escape its Muppet origins."

"I once saw this film in Italian, and it was hilarious. [...] This scene [of the Skeksis who plot against each other], in particular, was a lot of fun, because when listen to it Italian, it's like a demented Vatican."

"I think that the original movie, for anyone who’s a fan of it and fell in love with it, I do think melancholy is an intrinsic part of it. That’s part of the charm of it and the love of it."