You really see life around the principals to be as important as the main, principal actors. That's what cinéma vérité taught me - that it's not a question of having a main character, a great actor, and the rest is unimportant. Every detail, every face in the crowd is important.
I get out of the taxi and it's probably the only city which in reality looks better than on the postcards, New York.
I lived long enough in a society where freedom of speech was nonexistent, and I know what kind of misery that creates - starting with the fact that life becomes very boring for people who just try to survive, and are quiet, and try not to buck the system. And, of course, it can be devastating for people who try to speak against it.
Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom.
People must not think that all bad in man which is unleashed, the moment you impose censorship disappears from man.
Memories are doing funny things to us.
The worst evil is - and that's the product of censorship - is the self-censorship, because that twists spines, that destroys my character because I have to think something else and say something else, I have to always control myself.
For me, speaking is work. It's not like when you breathe.
Ideological pressure is much more crippling than commercial pressure. Crippling to your own freedom of thinking and creating, crippling the final results. If you wanted to succeed during the really hard-line totalitarian regime, you have to make so many compromises to please the censors that you don't recognize the original idea from the final result.
What I like about masturbation is that you don't have to talk afterwards.
I'm convinced the Beatles are partly responsible for the fall of Communism.
I tell you, in my opinion, the cornerstone of democracy is free press - that's the cornerstone.
The Czech movies, the quality movies, are trying to show the life in the country as it is, in an entertaining way, while in America, the majority of movies are wonderful fairy tales.
People who make documentaries have to be faithful to the facts. But when you are making a drama, a fiction based on the life, all you have to be faithful to is the spirit of the facts, which I think I was in every case. As long as you don't violate their spirit, you can play with the facts.
When you finish a film, before the first paying audience sees it, you don't have any idea. You don't know if you made a success or a flop, when it comes to the box office.
Communists love to make films about composers, because composers compose music and don't talk subversive things.
Usually you don't think about re-releasing an old movie.
First of all, to defend my work, I had to believe that I am doing a totally silly, stupid, innocent comedy.
You know what happened, you know, in 1938: France, England, you know, just sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
I think everybody dreamt somehow to make a film in Hollywood, you know.
Well, listen, you know, the Czech saying is, you know, when you are drowning you are grabbing even a little twig. That's what all Czechs were doing, grabbing for... with the hope for this little twig.
So I left with Jean Claude and went to Paris, so when the Russians came to Prague, I was in Paris.
Because I just loved to spend two years of my life in the company of Andy Kaufman and other characters.
Definitely it would be foolish to try and make my Czech films here in America, as foolish as it is when some Czech filmmakers try to make movies of America in Czechoslovakia. It was always abysmal stuff.
You know, 20 years... the films of television when it started, the literature, radio in communist countries, they're clean as a whistle; there was no violence, no sex, no drugs, nothing.
