Never be put off by anything because failure teaches you something.
There's a little thing on your shoulder called intuition and it whispers in your ear. Everyone has that, there is a voice telling you to do something. Most people ignore it - but you must listen to it. I do it every day, all day.
Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?
How can you look at the galaxy and not feel insignificant?
I want to make films about the human condition, what we're doing to the world or ourselves.
Once you crack the script, everything else follows.
Nowadays, everything's evolved into superheroes and it's boring. If I see one more superhero movie I'm going to shoot myself.
The whole process of making movies and writing screenplays is visceral and intuitive.
I'm not criticizing Hollywood because I work there, I partly live there. But I'm saying this is the way it is, commerce is taking over art. Commerce has become the most important thing in the film industry. Hollywood is an industry, it's not an art form, therefore they have to address the bottom line. But in a way it's sad when you get a remake, isn't it?
Audiences are less intrigued, honestly, by battle. They're more intrigued by human relations. If you're making a film about the trappings of the period, and you're forgetting that human relationships are the most engaging part of the storytelling process, then you're in trouble.
There's nothing really original. Alien was a B-movie. Five directors passed on it before me. Because I was into Heavy Metal, I read it, and thought, "Wow, I want to do this." I was on a plane to Hollywood in 22 hours. It was a B-movie and was elevated to an A-plus movie by sheer good taste.
Blade Runner was the godfather of all these fantastic movies that occur today. What's frustrating is that we're short of really great writing and great ideas. Blade Runner was full of them.
I think there's nothing worse than inertia. You can inert and study your navel and gradually you'll fall off the chair. I think the key is to keep flying.
I'm a moviemaker, not a documentarian. I try to hit the truth.
It doesn't matter how much faith you have or don't have [in aliens]. I just don't buy the idea that we're alone. There's got to be some form of life out there.
I love different themes, different venues, different movies. I love to jump about and tackle different subjects. I have no intellectual master plan.
I think movies are getting dumber, actually. Where it used to be 50/50, now it`s 3% good, 97% stupid.
In my view, the only way to see a film remains the way the filmmaker intended: inside a large movie theater with great sound and pristine picture.
But Gladiator is one of my favourite adventures because I really loved going into the world. I loved creating the world to the degree where you could almost smell it.
Usually, when special effects get in the way, it's because the story isn't strong enough. If you don't start with a strong screenplay, it's easy to fall back on special effects, thinking it's going to carry you. But it never works. It's just tiresome.
As I'm getting older, I want to make sure every film I do really counts.
I think moviemakers are dramatists.
I think one of the successes of Gladiator is how we manage to turn on a dime the character from one thing to another where you believe he is one thing and he is something very different.
I don't ever blink, honestly.
Scaring someone's the hardest thing to do, and that's why most of scary movies are not scary. They're sick, but not scary. There's a lot of sickness out there, of people who then sit there and watch it, which I think is absolutely dismaying.
