I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move!
I don't think plot as a plot means much today. I'd say that everybody has seen every plot twenty times. What they haven't seen is characters and their relation to one another. I don't worry much about plot anymore.
A good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes.
When you've got some talent, your job is to use it.
I think girls who insult people are very attractive.
Fortune favors the prepared.
You can't fix a bad script after you start shooting. The problems on the page only get bigger as they move to the big screen.
I find that when you open on a group of people sitting down and talking, the scene sits down with them. The best antidote for that is an entrance. Begin the scene with someone entering, and somehow it’s more interesting.
There's action only if there is danger.
The western is the simplest form of drama - a gun, death.
I guarantee you that two directors that are any good can take the same story, change the name of the characters, change the name of the town, and make an entirely different picture.
John Wayne represents more force, more power, than anybody else on the screen.
I get a little sick of these New Yorkers who want me to make some psychic thing, like 'The Left-Handed Gun.' They don't know anything about Western history.
I made 'Rio Bravo' with John Wayne. It worked out pretty well and we both liked it, so a few years later we decided to make it again. Worked out pretty good that time, too.
