Everybody's a filmmaker today.
I may not be the strongest guy or the most well armed, but you can put me in a room with a pencil and a piece of paper and I can kill anybody.
The people that really pass judgment on you really have nothing to do with what you do, usually.
You know, I find it very strange when movies that I made that were just excoriated - I mean that I was just vilified for - are now looked at as classics.
I became a loner. I became a mountain man. A lot of those things are very good qualities and they help you do your work, help you be singular and keep the artistic integrity of your work intact, but they don't make it very easy to live your life.
I felt that the Star Wars series became very pretentious as time went on. Just heavy and leaden.
Writing requires a great deal of skill, just like painting does. People don't want to learn those skills.
Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.
Egotism is not a good quality. It's not something to be admired or even tolerated. It wouldn't be tolerated in a field commander and it shouldn't be tolerated in a movie director.
Films are always pretentious. There's nothing more pretentious than a filmmaker.
I'm the barbarian of Hollywood.
I suppose when I started out I would have liked to have been the darling of critics or something, but everybody wants to be loved and admired.
I was never conscious of my screenplays having any acts. It's all bullshit.
Most artists think they're frauds anyway.
No, you're either born a writer, a storyteller, or you're not.
I find that screenwriting is at best kind of a hackwork in some ways.
I mean, the old film critics just excoriated me.
Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.
To be a good executive you have to be strong, and you have to have a simple attribute that people have forgotten about - courage.
Matter of fact, the style that people use today, I invented in a way.
I hardly said a word to my wife until I said 'yes' to divorce.
I also thought of myself as the Sonny Barger of the film industry.
A lot of people thought of me as a threat to Western civilization.
A lot of directors don't know what they want to do. Every director I've seen that was a good director that I've admired knew exactly what he wanted to do. They didn't sit there and think about it.
There is a certain kind of respect for authenticity today that there wasn't back in the days when they did 'Cleopatra,' where everything looked like a giant motel. People want to have it be authentic in the look, and authentic in the way people behave.
