film-producers-from-england

"I was also invited to give a couple of informal seminars to the Animation School at the RCA. These were so informal that they could hardly have been said to happen, but they taught me more than I really wanted to know about the way in which our simple craft had been inflated into a maniac pretentious pseudo-art."

"And all of these things, the selection of just the right characters, just the right soundtrack, and just the right tone is an incredibly hard thing to pull off in TV; incredibly hard. You can't fake it, you can't screw up your face and slog your way through it: it only occurs when an innate facet of someone's character is allowed to bleed into the production, giving it a unique personality and resonance all of it's own."

"Animation wasn't so much an imitation of life - it was a punctuation of conversation. We always stayed on the one who was talking. It made for a very simple film that was very clear, and there were no unnecessary things going on all around the edges. If I'm going to say something to you then I'm going to do it with a certain amount of gestures; in-between the times I'm completely still. This was how we managed to get through 120 seconds of footage a day, when most studios were getting through 10 seconds. We'd never move a mouth, we'd change the expression, because people were watching the hands."

"All the way through, if you look at my films, you will see that my animation is very economical, but very powerful. Because, I'm not recreating life, I am illustrating a story and telling a story by an extension of the pen. I'm coming at it from the other direction, and what is the minimum amount of visual delivery that I have to do to get this to appear to be alive, which one has accepted more or less anyway that they're there, and to convey the movements, and it is surprising how much one needn't do, and how much better it is from not doing those things that animation doesn't do well."

"That voice of his was loved by the nation. I mean, if I could've been Oliver Postgate, with that voice, and with his mind, and those wonderful, wonderful stories, I would have given my teeth. He puts his arms round you, figuratively speaking, and says "Look, it's all right. Don't worry. Whatever I'm on about at this moment, there's security here with me." And that's the voice that does it; I had to work to be loved, Oliver Postgate, lucky man, didn't."

"That was all, but I was fizzing with excitement. It didn't matter what the picture was of. It didn't matter that Master Ho had stumbled rather than walked… I had done something momentous. I had opened up another dimension to the still picture. I had given it the extra dimension of time. I had made it come to life."

"We would go to the BBC once a year, show them the films we'd made, and they would say, "Yes, lovely, now what are you going to do next?" We would tell them, and they would say, "That sounds fine, we'll mark it in for eighteen months from now", and we would be given praise and encouragement and some money in advance."

"[Responding to the perceived surrealism of Clangers] They're surreal but logical. I have a strong prejudice against fantasy for its own sake. Once one gets to a point beyond where cause and effect mean anything at all, then science fiction becomes science nonsense. Everything that happened was strictly logical according to the laws of physics which happened to apply in that part of the world."

"Their [politicians] words and phrases are skillfully chosen to keep us complacent and confident in our fairly comfortable world. We don’t usually notice this because ours is a world in which whether or not the words we are offered are true rarely makes much difference to our lives. But, out in the real world, the way words are used or misused can make the difference between life and death."

"The films we made were aimed at the Head of Department at the BBC, who was about 57 at the time, and she was a nice lady called Ursula Eason, and very humane and ordinary, and full of fun. If we had studied children in any way, apart from having children, we wouldn't necessarily have succeeded in selling the films, because the woman at the BBC had fairly clear opinions of what she would find acceptable, and these were conditioned in some ways by the fact she was a middle-aged, English (well, Irish actually, if you go all the way back) lady, who was brought up as I was on Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne, and Lewis Carroll, and all the sort of 'Founding Fathers' of English Tweeness."

"What matters most is the story, and it should never be sacrificed to the method. These days immense quantities of money are spent making something that doesn't call for it. As a result, to raise enough backing, children's films have to be dumbed down for the widest possible market."

"And they [Smallfilms] had a superb ear for creating sound effects that children could easily mimic the moment the programme had finished: just think about the swanny-whistle voices of the Clangers, the beatbox rhythm of Ivor's engine, or the marvellous carousel of just bloody lovely sounds that made up most of Bagpuss […] These are the sounds I hear in my own head when I remember my own childhood, and Oliver Postgate put them there."

"Come to think of it I must have produced some of the clumsiest animation ever to disgrace the television screen, but it didn’t matter. The viewers didn’t notice because they were enjoying the stories."

"Being creative, having to do something new, invent something, alter things, in order to show you're still there is a personality fault, basically. I think a lot of people who have done creative things do so because if they don't, they cease to exist. This, I know, is true of myself, and I wouldn't wish it onto other people. There is nothing quite like as frightening as having a wife and six children and a blank piece of paper, which is your next year's feeding, and you have to pull out of the sky your livelihood. The idea of being able to live on one's creativity, where you are dubious of its continuity, is a recipe for terrible anxiety."

"Despite its huge wealth, vast oil reserves, and love of high-tech American ornaments, nothing really works in Saudi Arabia."

"We will never know exactly what the zoologist was accused of or what defense he offered because Saudi judicial proceedings, conducted in secret, aren’t concerned with time consuming niceties like witnesses, lawyers, juries, or even evidence. The system relies entirely on signed confessions obtained by the police. It’s strange how methods of torture are one of the few things that cross all racial, religious, and cultural boundaries—poor militia in Rwanda who worship ghosts use pretty much the same methods as rich Catholics supervising state security in Columbia. As a result, the Muslim cops who took the zoologist into a cell in a Jeddah prison had nothing new to offer—just a heavy-duty truck battery with special clips for the genitals and nipples."

"With each step his desperation grew—maybe every scrap of gossip he had heard, every assumption he had made added up to nothing more than a grand delusion. Like a fool, he had believed what he wanted to believe—"

"He came toward me and I realized I was being given the singular honor denied to so many dictators and mass murderers—I was going to be thrown out of a Swiss bank."

"I’ve always been pretty much on the outside of any side you can find."

"If only—but it has been my unfortunate experience that you can’t rely on divine intervention and that fate favors the bad as often as the good."

"Apart from opium poppies and hemp plants, kidnappings for ransom had become about the only growth industry in Afghanistan."

"I went to open the front passenger’s door. It was locked and she indicated the rear seat. Apparently it was okay for a Muslim woman to lead a man to his death but not to share the front seat with him."

"I have heard people say love is weak, but they’re wrong—love is strong. In nearly everyone it trumps all other things—patriotism and ambition, religion and upbringing. And of every kind of love—the epic and the small, the noble and the base—the one that a parent has for their child is the greatest of them all. That was the lesson I learned that day, and I’ll be forever grateful I did—some years later, deep in the ruins called the Theater of Death, it salvaged everything."

"Not everybody knows this—or cares probably—but the first law of forensic science is Locard’s Exchange Principle, and it says “Every contact between a perpetrator and a crime scene leaves a trace.”"

"The killer had obviously grasped one important concept, a thing that eludes most people who decide on her line of work—nobody’s ever been arrested for a murder; they have only ever been arrested for not planning it properly."

"Set amid rolling acres of lavender, the complex of seven luxurious homes, swimming pools and lavish stables was surrounded by a twelve-foot wall patrolled by what we believed to be Albanians armed with Skorpion machine pistols. This was strange, given that the family was in the wholesale florist business. Maybe flower theft was a bigger problem in northern Greece than most people realized."

"I had got up in the morning and, by the time I was ready for bed it was a different planet—the world doesn’t change in front of your eyes; it changes behind your back."

"Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them."

"The driver thought I was crazy—but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even."

"Crime intelligence reports from any police force in Europe would tell you that half of Albania was involved in the murder-for-hire business."

"I wandered past the stacks of drying wood, thinking about how many great skills the world had lost, how many things of value had passed without any of us even noticing. The old men with their chisels and handsaws would have once been the most highly paid members of their community and what had we put in their place? Financial engineers and young currency traders."

"Like the old virologist had said—sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences."

"“Then what happened?” I asked. “The Russian stopped calling, more important, the bills weren’t paid—I guess he either went broke or another oligarch had him killed.” Probably the latter, I thought. That was the way most business disputes were settled in Russia."

"Heavily armed men in uniform were everywhere, but there was nothing you could call genuine security: as usual, too many guns, not enough intelligence."

"I had read about it, of course, but I had never actually seen the machinery of a totalitarian state in full flight. For anyone who values privacy and freedom it’s a terrifying thing to behold."

"The effectiveness of any operation is in inverse proportion to the number of people used."

"We’ve got one huge advantage—people believe what they see in databases. They’ve never learned the most important rule of cyberspace—computers don’t lie but liars can compute."

"“A few years after the bonfire of the mob came for him and his family. Like he said, it’s always the same—they start out burning books and end up burning people. Out of his parents and five kids, he was the only survivor. “He passed through three camps in five years—all of them death camps, including Auschwitz. Because it was such a miracle he had survived, I asked him what he had learned. “He laughed. ‘Nothing you call original,’ he said. Death’s terrible, suffering’s worse, as usual the assholes made up the majority—on both sides of the wire. “Then he thought for a moment. There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he’d learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you—just listen to them.” Whisperer turned and looked at me. “So that’s what you meant, huh? You’ve been listening to the Muslim fundamentalists?” “Yes,” I replied. “I’ve heard bombs going off in our embassies, mobs screaming for blood, mullahs issuing death decrees, so-called leaders yelling for jihad. They’ve been burning books, Dave—the temperature of hate in parts of the Islamic world has gone out to Pluto. And I’ve been listening to them.” “And you don’t think we have—the people in Washington?” He said it without anger. I was at one time a leading intelligence agent and I think he genuinely wanted to know. “Maybe in your heads. Not in your gut.”"

"The old Nobel Laureate in Virginia had been right when he had asked if the greatest industrial nation in history actually produced goods and machinery anymore. Millions of jobs, along with most of the country’s manufacturing base, had been exported over the decades and a great deal of the nation’s safety disappeared with them."

"“Twenty-five years ago he was executed.” It shocked me. “Executed?” I said. “For what?” The director scanned a couple of documents and found the one he was looking for. “The usual—corruption on earth.” “I’m sorry, but what exactly does ‘corruption on earth’ mean?” He laughed. “Pretty much whatever we want.” Nearly all of his team found it funny too. “In this case,” he continued, “it meant that he criticized the royal family and advocated its removal.”"

"“Not all death warrants are signed by judges or governors,” I explained. “This one was a prenup agreement.”"

"I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty."

"I mean, there’s no better alibi than being dead, is there?"

"By this stage I had switched my patronage to AA—as Tolstoy might have said, drug addicts are all alike whereas every alcoholic is crazy in his own way. This led to far more interesting meetings and I had decided that if you were going to spend your life on the wagon, you might as well be entertained."

"Several guards and retainers exchanged a glance—Gaza was not somewhere to be taken lightly; it was probably the only place in the world that made Afghanistan look safe."

"The Saracen approached them and lifted the woman’s robe in order to examine her more closely. Underneath, he saw that her cotton shirt was crumpled and ripped and her jeans had lost the buttons at the fly. He couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to her on the trip—the outlaws who abducted her might have been devout Muslims but they were also men. Her tattered shirt barely covered her belly, and the Saracen, being a doctor, guessed from the sight of it that she was about four months pregnant. A different man—a less religious and a more humane man—might have been affected by it. But not the Saracen—the prisoners weren’t people to him, they were a gift from God."

"In the Army, as in life, sometimes you had to create a crisis in order to get people’s attention."

"I had been to Jeddah on my previous trip, so I knew it well enough. As somebody once said, there was only one thing to recommend it—say you wanted to commit suicide and couldn’t quite find the courage, two days in Jeddah would do the trick."

"I know this woman. We all do—the type anyway. You see them in the huge new Prada store in Milan, queuing outside the clubs in Soho, sipping skinny lattes in the hot cafés on the Avenue Montaigne—young women who mistake People magazine for news and a Japanese symbol on their backs as a sign of rebellion."

"DNA doesn’t lie."