Great Throughts Treasury

"Success means living the life of the heart."

"Usually, the stuff that's your best idea or work is going to be attacked the most. "

"You have to really be courageous about your instincts and your ideas. Otherwise you'll just knuckle under, and things that might have been memorable will be lost. "

"I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing. "

""Wall Streets got interested in film and communications, and these are the people who brought you the Big Mac. In the past twelve years, I can't think of one classic they've made." (1996)"

""The Godfather" films are personal. And they are, even though our family were never gangsters, and we only heard about somebody who knew a gangster. But still, the real day-to-day reality of the Italian family that was put into the gangster film was based on my family and what I remember as a kid. You can't make films without them being personal to some extent."

"A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually."

"All of a sudden, there are great Japanese films, or great Italian films, or great Australian films. It's usually because there are a number of people that cross- pollinated each other."

"Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos."

"Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest directors ever to work in the cinema. His films meant an enormous amount to me when I was starting my own career."

"As I grow older, I realize that I always wanted to be a writer. With "The Godfather" being such a success, I was launched into a more industry-type career, which is wonderful, but I always wanted to be the director of my own material. I have always credited the writer of the original material above the title: Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Bram Stoker's Dracula, or John Grisham's The Rainmaker. I felt that I didn't have the right to Francis Coppola's anything unless I had written the story and the screenplay. I view "Tetro" as the second film of my second career. From now on I'm always going to writing the scripts, and every film will be personal. I'm going to be the kind of filmmaker I wanted to be when I was beginning."

"Basically, both the Mafia and America feel they are benevolent organizations. And both the Mafia and America have their hands stained with blood from what it is necessary to do to protect their power and interests."

"As long as I can make lots of money in other businesses, I'll continue to subsidize my own work."

"Art depends on luck and talent."

"George Lucas doesn't have the most physical stamina. He was so unhappy making Star Wars that he just vowed he'd never do it again."

"Brando wants to do what you want, but he wants people to be honest and not try to manipulate him."

"Frank Capra was a prop man, I think. John Ford was a prop man. It was a little bit of a father and son thing, and you kind of worked your way up."

"Here's a tip to young directors. They never fire you midweek."

"Hollywood doesn't really exist. What we're talking about now is the "big industry" film - films that are packaged as a certain idea of action, and in many cases violence or thrills or mystery. These films aren't expressions of the writer, but a compendium of ideas that could work as a blockbuster hit. That's not Hollywood - it's just wherever people want to make a lot of money. The less expensive a film is, the more ambitious the ideas and themes can be. And the converse is true - the more a film costs, the more salary everyone makes, the more limited the subject-matter has to be."

"I always found the film world unpleasant. It's all about the schedule, and never really flew for me."

"I associate my motion picture career more with being unhappy and scared, or being under the gun, than with anything pleasant."

"I bring to my life a certain amount of mess."

"I believe that filmmaking - as, probably, is everything - is a game you should play with all your cards, and all your dice, and whatever else you've got. So, each time I make a movie, I give it everything I have. I think everyone should, and I think everyone should do everything they do that way."

"I became quite successful very young, and it was mainly because I was so enthusiastic and I just worked so hard at it."

"I didn't particularly want to make Godfather II! I always felt that The Godfather was a perfectly good drama and ended all the aspects of the story: it resolved the character and was really meant to be one movie. It only got to be a second and a third out of the greed of companies wanting to make more of them. On Godfather II, I had just as much control over the production as I had with "Youth Without Youth" because it was my own. Because The Godfather was so successful, I could do anything I wanted. But even though maybe Godfather II was a good film or a better film, I still feel that Godfather I was complete. I only did Godfather II because I thought it would be interesting to make a film about a man and his father at the same age and tell the two stories in parallel, which is what I did. And that was an achievement."

"I don't see any method at all... Sir."

"I don't think Godfather ever should have had more than one movie, actually. It was not a serial, it was a drama. The first movie wrapped up everything. To make more than one Godfather was just greed. Basically, making a movie costs so much money that they want it to be like Coca-Cola: you just make the same thing over and over again to make money, which is what they're doing now. But Godfather was not really a serial, you know?"

"I do the things I love on the theory that ? there might be other people enjoying the same things that I enjoy, ... And I just gravitate to what I think is authentic, pleasurable and has quality."

"I had a heartbreaking experience when I was 9. I always wanted to be a guard. The most wonderful girl in the world was a guard. When I got polio and then went back to school, they made me a guard. A teacher took away my guard button."

"I had a number of teachers who hated me. I didn't do well in school."

"I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini."

"I had a little fantasy that goes like this: I'm getting to be an influential person in San Francisco; what if I and five other powerful guys with cigars got together in a smoke-filled room to decide who would be the next mayor of San Francisco? We'd do it because we're good guys and we really want the city to be wonderful for everybody. Then I thought, what's the difference between five good guys holding that kind of power and five bad guys? Just good intentions, and intentions can be corrupted."

"I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, so I had an early exposure to literature, and and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies."

"I had been a kid that moved so much, I didn't have a lot of friends. Theater really represented camaraderie."

"I had been so conditioned to think the film was bad - too dark, too long, too boring - that I didn't think it would have any success. In fact, the reason I took the job to write "The Great Gatsby" was because I had no money and three kids and was sure I'd need the money. I heard about the success of The Godfather from my wife, who called me while I was writing Gatsby. I wasn't even there. Masterpiece, ha! I was not even confident it would be a mild success."

"I have always been a little disappointed about "One from the Heart" because I really wanted to make it more like live cinema. I really wanted to shoot it with 12 cameras and edit it all in the camera. At the last minute I chickened out because the photographer chickened out. So for me with One From The Heart, I always feel that I should have gone that last yard. It was only the cinematographer coming to me saying, "Oh please, I don't want to shoot it with 12 cameras because I can't light it." I think, no question, it was beautiful photographically - he was right. But to me the experiment was a little incomplete. It had wonderful music, wonderful songs. It would be nice if people liked One From The Heart because it was my big failure."

"I have come here to rediscover myself as an artist."

"I just feel that at a certain point you have to go back to the beginning again. The best thing for me at this point in my life is to become a student again and make movies with the eyes I had when I was enthusiastic about it in the first place."

"I like simplicity; I don't need luxury."

"I liked to work in a shop down in the basement and invent things and build gadgets."

"I made this movie for $40,000, which was this little black-and-white horror film called Dementia 13, which we made in about nine days."

"I like Bob [Robert De Niro], I just don't know if he likes himself."

"I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue."

"I probably have genius. But no talent."

"I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep, he said, "I was so happy when this young person took from me." Because that's what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can't steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that's how you will find your voice. And that's how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don't worry about whether it's appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that's only the first step and you have to take the first step."

"I remember growing up with television, from the time it was just a test pattern, with maybe a little bit of programming once in a while."

"I realized I probably wouldn't make another film that cuts through commercial and creative things like 'Godfather' or 'Apocalypse.'"

"I remember teachers who really singled me out for their discouragement."

"I see this all as steps on the path to something. Maybe I'll be more qualified to do 'Megalopolis' if I really digest this film. In a sense, I think a movie is really a little like a question and when you make it, that's when you get the answer."

"I think "Tetro" is the most beautiful film I've ever done in terms of how it was made. I don't know what people will make of the picture, but just the filmmaking part of it, I've learnt to put it together beautifully."