Film Producers From England

"If I tape an 11-hour day, guess which parts end up on air. Not the bits when I'm pleasant, but the parts when I'm obnoxious."

"I changed my diet and I’ve not looked back since. You feel better, you look better. I cut out a lot of the stuff I shouldn’t have been eating and that was primarily meat, dairy, wheat, sugar — those were the four main things. … Once you get into a pattern I’ve found it quite enjoyable. It has helped me sleep and I wake up feeling less tired. I noticed a massive difference in how I felt in about a week. I have more energy and focus and it wasn’t difficult. I don’t like to use the word diet because that’s the reason I never went on a diet before — the word diet makes me miserable."

"If Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire 100 million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, without a second thought and irrespective of what that did to the year's profits. What do we do with a crappy movie? We double its advertising budget and hope for a big opening weekend. What have we done for the audience as they walk out of the cinema? We've alienated them. We've sold audiences a piece of junk; we just took twelve dollars away from a couple and we think we've done ourselves no long-term damage."

"[H]e felt frustrated, his sense of fate and direction subverted by banalities - the frustration of the man who, having thought himself following his destiny, finds he is actually on the A318 to New Malden."

"Earlier last year, following the spate of statues being toppled as part of the Black Lives Matter protests, a protester a long way from Minneapolis – in Broadstairs, Kent – sprayed the words "Dickens Was A Racist" on the Dickens House Museum. The protester was called Ian Driver and he was prompted by a letter that Dickens had written decrying the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Unquestionably, the letter is racist. However, it is strange that Driver had to go all the way to a relatively obscure piece of correspondence by Dickens to become inflamed by his racism, when, in Oliver Twist, in plain sight, and widely known to us for many, many years, has been Fagin. But maybe he doesn't count."

"It's revealing [...] Because the obvious thing to say is not that the documentary demonizes Hamas - it simply shows Hamas, through their own audio and footage - but that the documentary makes uncomfortable viewing for those who wish to believe that Hamas represents the Palestinians, both their suffering and their political purpose, rather than being inspired by Jew-hatred and violcence [sic]."

"[A]ction restarting action: all we need to reverse inertia is some sense of consequence - some sense that beyond this occurrence there is another, and that they are linked, some sense that life has chapters."

"That's the thing about your destiny: how are you supposed to know it when it arrives? How are you supposed to recognise it from the random life?"

"With The Dark Knight you had to strike a balance of familiarity with the audience. It is a sequel, and they want familiar elements, things they liked from the first film. But you always have to be very aware that the audience is extremely ruthless in its demand for newness, novelty and freshness. At script stage, we really tried to thrash that out—are we striking that right balance?"

"What I try to do is write from the inside out. I really try to jump into the world of the film and the characters, try to imagine myself in that world rather than imagining it as a film I’m watching onscreen. Sometimes, that means I’m discovering things the way the audience will, with character and story. Other times, you’re plotting it out with diagrams and taking a very objective view. Writing, for me, is a combination of both. You take an objective approach at times to get you through things, and you take a subjective approach at other times, and that allows you to find an emotional experience for the audience."

"When you think of the visual style, when you think of the visual language of a film there tends to be a natural separation of the visual style and the narrative elements, but with the great, whether it is Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick or Hitchcock what you're seeing is inseparable, a vital relationship between the images and the story he's telling."

"The ultimate embodiment of Bruce Wayne. He has exactly the balance of darkness and light that we were looking for."

"I do a lot of my best thinking in those kind of in-between moments that people now fill with online activity."

"It seems to me a long way to go just to sit in a non-drinking, non-smoking environment on the offchance your name is called. … It's as if you are entered into a race you don't particularly want to run in. All the hoops you have to jump through on these occasions: it's not my favourite occupation. Walking around in the spotlight having to be me is not something I'm particularly comfortable with or desire. I'd sooner pretend to be someone else."

"Unlike writers or painters, we don't sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, 'How do I start? Where do I start?' We're given the springboard of the text, a plane ticket, told to report to Alabama, and there's a group of people all ready to make a film and it's a marvelous life."

"To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life."

"My dad was great. He was very droll, very dry. The first time that he came to London when I was in the theatre and my name was in lights for the very first time and we had the same name, and he passed the theatre with me on the way, he was going to see a matinee and me, and my mother and he passed the theatre, and I said, 'Look,' and he looked up at my name in lights, and stood there for five minutes, and I'm going, 'I want to have lunch and get back for the matinee,' and I'm with my mother, and he still stood there and so, I went back to get him and he just said, 'I never thought that I'd see my name in lights.'"

"It's true that old actors don't die, their parts get smaller. You're less likely to get the part, many parts, if you're playing people your age as opposed to people who are younger. There are fewer parts around."

"I don't think that we necessarily lie. I mean, we make our living by pretending that we're someone else. I don't tell tall tales. I always tell the truth."

"I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach."

"Actors are cattle. I've always said actors are cattle. In fact, Carole Lombard once built a corral on set and put three live calves into it, in recognition of my feelings. I tell them that, and treat them as such, and we get along fineǃ"

"The lower lip definitely states that all actors are cattle—including the authorǃ"

"It still goes. But Pat is the nicest cattle I've ever seen."

"[T]he director passed off the phrase as one of his "Machiavellian quips," not to be taken seriously. "Let us say, rather, that actors are a necessary evil," he cautioned, with a straight face. "As a matter of fact, I couldn't work if I weren't on friendly terms with them; I'll bend over backward every time. Besides, I get into each picture I make, if only for a couple of seconds—so I'm probably a frustrated actor at heart myself.""

"Hitchcock: You know that I think all actors are cattle? George Raft: Yes, I know—but I'm no actor."

"The man with the navy-blue voice."

"Like Freud, Hitchcock diagnosed the discontents that chafe and rankle beneath the decorum of civilization. Like Picasso or Dali, he registered the phenomenological threat of an abruptly modernised world."

"Here is someone … who has an enormous, inordinate, neurotic fear of disorder. And that's from which he makes his art. He always has his people in a moment of disorder. They think they're in control, they think they have power, they think they have order, and then he just slips the rug out from under them to see what they're going to do."

"I'd like to know more about his relationships with women. No, on second thought, I wouldn't."

"Hitch is a gentleman farmer who raises goose flesh."

"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it."

"The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema."

"In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life."

"I’m not against the police; I'm just afraid of them."

"I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat, and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are . Had the beautiful Miss Reville not accepted a lifetime contract without options as Mrs. Alfred Hitchcock some 53 years ago, Mr. Alfred Hitchcock might be in this room tonight, not at this table but as one of the slower waiters on the floor."

"[This award is] meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid."

"Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints."

"Self-plagiarism is style."

"Give them pleasure – the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare."

"Puns are the highest form of literature."

"Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms."

"Seeing a murder on television can … help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."

"One of television's great contributions is that it brought murder back into the home, where it belongs."

"Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house."

"I deny that I ever said actors are cattle. What I said was, "Actors should be treated like cattle.""

"We do not recommend suicide as a way of life."

"A clear horizon — nothing to worry about on your plate, only things that are creative and not destructive and that's within yourself. Within me I can't bear quarreling, I can't bear feelings between people. I think hatred is wasted energy and it's all non-productive. I'm very sensitive. A sharp word, said by a person who has a temper, if they're close to me, hurts me for days. I know we're only human, we do go in for these various emotions, call them negative emotions but when all these are removed and you can look forward, and the road is clear ahead, and now you're going to create something. I think that's as happy as I would ever want to be."

"I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes … have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I’ve never tasted it."

"You can't direct a Laughton picture. The best you can hope for is to referee."

"The Birds could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made."