Quotes

The only person who has the right attitude about boxing in the movies for me was Buster Keaton.

[on sports] Anything with a ball, no good.

Because of the movies I make, people get nervous, because they think of me as difficult and angry. I am difficult and angry, but they don't expect a sense of humor. And the only thing that gets me through is a sense of humor.

[on Raging Bull (1980)] Robert De Niro wanted to make this film. Not me. I don't understand anything about boxing. For me, it's like a physical game of chess.

It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily.

I think when you're young and have that first burst of energy and make five or six pictures in a row that tell the stories of all the things in life you want to say... well, maybe those are the films that should have won me the Oscar. When Taxi Driver (1976) was up for Best Picture, it got three other nominations: Best Actor [Robert De Niro], Best Supporting Actress [Jodie Foster] and Best Music. But the director and writer were overlooked. I was so disappointed, I said, "You know what? That's the way it's going to be." What was I going to do, go home and cry?

Basically, you make another movie, and another, and hopefully you feel good about every picture you make. And you say, "My name is on that. I did that. It's okay." But don't get me wrong, I still get excited by it all. That, I hope, will never disappear.

I think a lot of it has to do with the nature of the community. I've lived here in Los Angeles, but I'm more of a New Yorker, and the nature of my films is regarded as somewhat violent and the language is considered tough. As you grow older, you change. I make different films now. You don't make pictures for Oscars.

I'm in a different chapter of my life. As time goes by and I grow older, I find that I need to just be quiet and think. There have been periods when I've locked myself away for days, but now it's different--I'm married and we have a daughter who is in my office the whole time.

If I continue to make films about New York, they will probably be set in the past. The "new" New York I don't know much about. It's not that I'm against contemporary film. I'm open to it in general, but I find the new colors of the city, the new Times Square, kind of shocking. I guess I'm stuck in a time warp.

It probably is better I didn't win in the '70s or mid-'80s or something. My view on making films is somewhat different in a way, and I think maybe it's something that . . . I was not able to handle at the time . . . Had I gotten an Oscar, maybe I would have gotten maybe an extra two days shooting, maybe a couple, you know what I'm saying?

I prefer celluloid--there's no doubt about it. Yet I know that if I was starting to make movies now, as a young person, if I could get my hands on a DV [digital video] camera, I probably would have started that way . . . There's no doubt I'm an older advocate of pure celluloid, but ultimately I see it going by the wayside, except in museums, and even then it could be a problem.

My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else.

There is no such thing as pointless violence. City of God (2002), is that pointless violence? It's reality, it's real life, it has to do with the human condition. Being involved in Christianity and Catholicism when I was very young, you have that innocence, the teachings of Christ. Deep down you want to think that people are really good--but the reality outweighs that.

I'm a lapsed Catholic. But I am Roman Catholic--there's no way out of it.

[on the Iraq war] One hopes that this kind of war can be done diplomatically, with intelligence rather than wiping out a lot of innocent civilians.

[on political correctness] You can hardly say anything about minorities now. It has made it extremely difficult to open your mouth.

[on the Iraq War] There are a lot of Americans who also feel that a lot of this war talk is economic, part of this has to do with the oil. I think it really has to come down to respecting how other people live. There's got to be ways this can be worked out diplomatically, there simply has to be.

What does it take to be a filmmaker in Hollywood? Even today I still wonder what it takes to be a professional or even an artist in Hollywood. How do you survive the constant tug of war between personal expression and commercial imperatives? What is the price you pay to work in Hollywood? Do you end up with a split personality? Do you make one movie for them, one for yourself?

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

[onstage at the 2007 Oscars after winning for Best Director] Could you double-check the envelope?

[on The Departed (2006)] It's the only movie of mine with a plot.

[on Robert De Niro] And even now I still know of nobody who can surprise me on the screen the way he does--and did then. No actor comes to mind who can provide such power and excitement.

[on working with Liza Minnelli on New York, New York (1977)] After 15 minutes I realized that not only could she sing, she could be one hell of an actress. She's so malleable and inventive. And fun, even when things are hard.

[on Stanley Kubrick] One of his films . . . is equivalent to ten of somebody else's. Watching a Kubrick film is like gazing up at a mountain top. You look up and wonder, "How could anyone have climbed that high?".

[on Stanley Kubrick] Why does something stay with you for so many years? It's really a person with a very powerful storytelling ability. A talent . . . a genius, who could create a solid rock image that has conviction.

But once Haig Manoogian started talking about film, I realized that I could put that passion into movies, and then I realized that the Catholic vocation was, in a sense, through the screen for me.

[on Kathryn Bigelow] I've always been a fan of hers, over the years . . . Blue Steel (1990) . . . She's good, she's really good.

It's hilarious, the problems that arise when you're on the set. It's really funny because you make a complete fool of yourself. I think I know how to use dissolves, the grammar of cinema. But there's only one place for the camera. That's the right place. Where is the right place? I don't know. You get there somehow.

I can't take shooting any scene for granted. I just can't. The moment I do that, I have no idea what I'm doing. "Oh, that'll be easy, I'll do that in five minutes." Believe me, that never happens.

[on Robert De Niro] I've come to know De Niro fairly well down the years. He's a very compassionate man. He's basically a very good man and you can see that in him. So he can take on characters that are pretty disturbing and make them human because of that compassion. It's taken me years to figure it out. He has an ability to make audiences feel empathy for very difficult characters because there is something very decent in him.

[on Akira Kurosawa] His influence on filmmakers throughout the entire world is so profound as to be almost incomparable.

[on Akira Kurosawa] The term "giant" is used too often to describe artists. But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.

[on Leonardo DiCaprio] Leo has a similar sensibility to me. I'm 30 years older than him, but I think we see the world the same way, meaning he feels comfortable with the characters I've dealt with over the years in movies. But also with Leo it's always an interesting process of discovery. And I don't say that in a facile way either, because we never know what that process is going to be, and it's always intimidating at first. And then Leo really gets into it and we start unravelling all these layers. With Shutter Island (2010) the story really lent itself to that.

When I did The Age of Innocence (1993), the critics said, "Is it wrong to expect a little more heat from Scorsese?" I thought "Age of Innocence" was pretty hot. So I said, "Alright, I'll do Casino (1995)," and they said, "Well, gee, it's the same as Goodfellas (1990)." You can't win. Yes, "Casino" has the style of "Goodfellas", but it has more to do with America and even Hollywood--the idea of never being satisfied.

Movies touch our hearts and awaken our vision, and change the way we see things. They take us to other places, they open doors and minds. Movies are the memories of our life time, we need to keep them alive.

The Color of Money (1986) was deep-rooted in social concern about the effect money has on the upper class. The billiards game in the film was a symbol depicting society. I very much liked Paul Newman in The Hustler (1961), and thought of repeating him in a character with more mature shades. He scored with his brilliant underplaying, winning an Oscar. He was very cooperative with newcomer Tom Cruise, who showed promise. In fact, the whistling tone in the film titles was Newman's idea. He was one of those actors who made method acting spontaneous, and his emerald eyes spoke volumes.

I considered it a true cinematic challenge of working with a versatile actor such as Robert De Niro, who molds himself according to each character. The only other actor who matches his histrionic ability is Al Pacino.

L'Avventura (1960) gave me one of the most profound shocks I've ever had at the movies, greater even than Breathless (1960) or Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Or La Dolce Vita (1960). At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the [Federico Fellini] film and the ones who liked "L'Avventura". I knew I was firmly on [Michelangelo Antonioni's side of the line, but if you'd asked me at the time, I'm not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini's pictures and I admired "La Dolce Vita", but I was challenged by "L'Avventura". Fellini's film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni's film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless. I was mesmerized by "L'Avventura" and by Antonioni's subsequent films, and it was the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional sense that kept drawing me back. They posed mysterie--or rather the mystery, of who we are, what we are, to each other, to ourselves, to time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the mysteries of the soul. That's why I kept going back. I wanted to keep experiencing these pictures, wandering through them. I still do.

[on casting Ray Liotta as Henry Hill in Goodfellas (1990)] I'd seen Ray in Something Wild (1986), Jonathan Demme's film; I really liked him. And then I met him. I was walking across the lobby of the hotel on the Lido that houses the Venice Film Festival, and I was there with The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). I had a lot of bodyguards around me. Ray approached me in the lobby and the bodyguards moved toward him, and he had an interesting way of reacting, which was he held his ground, but made them understand he was no threat. I liked his behavior at that moment, and I saw, Oh, he understands that kind of situation. That's something you wouldn't have to explain to him.

Very often I've known people who wouldn't say a word to each other, but they'd go to see movies together and experience life that way.

A painting can't turn. If you look closely at some of the portraits from cubism at the time, you'll find a portrait of a woman that is really a projector.

Every shot [while making Hugo (2011) in 3D] is rethinking cinema, rethinking narrative--how to tell a story with a picture. Now, I'm not saying we have to keep throwing javelins at the camera, I'm not saying we use it as a gimmick, but it's liberating. It's literally a Rubik's Cube every time you go out to design a shot, and work out a camera move, or a crane move. But it has a beauty to it also. People look like . . . like moving statues. They move like sculpture, as if sculpture is moving in a way. Like dancers . . .

[Hugo (2011)] [is] really the story of a little boy. But he does become friends with the older Georges Méliès who was discovered in 1927, or 1928, working in a toy store, completely bankrupt. And then he was revived in a way, with a beautiful gala in 1928, in Paris. And in my film, the cinema itself is the connection--the automaton, the machine itself becomes the emotional connection between the boy, his father, Méliès, and his family. It's about how it all comes together, how people express themselves using the technology emotionally and psychologically. It's the connection between the people, and the thing that's missing--how it supplies what's missing.

I've always liked 3D. I mean, we're sitting here in 3D. We are in 3D. We see in 3D. So why not?

[I remember the] curiosity and sense of completion [that drove him to seek out hard-to-find films in his youth, and the undeniable fetishism of film which underwrote that all-consuming passion]. It's interesting because the fetish ideas are all there in Peeping Tom (1960). All the elements: the projector is correct; the lenses are right; the sprockets are correct. Even the sounds of the sprockets are correct. You do . . .

There is a point in time, many times over the years . . . where I've loved to hear the sound of film going through a projector. And I could tell you if it's 35mm or 16mm, you know. Now that's gone, of course . . . but there's a certain kind of . . . it's like going into a trance almost, or I should say a "meditation" of some kind. It depends what you do with it. And it has to come out other ways. For me, it was burning to be able to express myself with cinema, and to be inspired by films.

[The colors of my childhood were inflected by the gaudy hues of Eastmancolor which were] very powerful, very strong and very lurid, and kind of violent in a way. What I saw growing up were those colors, when there was color. Normally, it was all hallways with single light bulbs; it was mainly black-and-white in a way. But when it was color, it was harsh, strong; some would say lurid. My formative years were in the '50s, when you had all those popular novels with paperback covers, and films like Raoul Walsh's Battle Cry (1955) were just splashed all over the consciousness of popular culture.

I think I was eight years old when I first saw Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) and it had a very strong impact on me for many reasons: the nature of the storytelling; the images; the editing; the camera movements; the use of music--and the color. And then I saw A Matter of Life and Death (1946) on a black-and-white television, and The Small Back Room (1949), again on TV, one afternoon when I was home sick from school. In New York, there was a television show called "The Million Dollar Movie", which would show a film twice a night for a week. And so one week it would be Citizen Kane (1941). Edited. With commercials. And with the "News on the March" sequence missing. Ha! That was the first time I'd ever seen it! Then, you know, you would get The Third Man (1949), with half the film cut out. But one of the films they showed was Michael Powell (I) and Emeric Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann (1951). And it was cut down to about an hour and 40 minutes or so, black-and-white, with commercials. And it had a quality like "The Red Shoes"--a darkness, and a humor. But what was so interesting to me was the way the camera moved with the music. And the sense of editing. I lived in a tenement with my mother and father and my brother at the time, and if that film was on twice a night, I'd have to keep watching it. At certain point, my mother would ask, "Is it necessary to watch that again?".

Well, I think in my own work the subject matter usually deals with characters I know, aspects of myself, friends of mine - that sort of thing. And we try to work it out. By 'work it out' I mean almost like 'work it through your system'. Particularly, I think, on films like Mean Streets (1973), or Taxi Driver (1976) from Paul Schrader's script. And Raging Bull (1980), especially. At the end of that film, Robert De Niro was fine, but me - I left Jake LaMotta's character more at peace with himself than I was with myself. And I was hoping to get to that moment that he was at the end of the film. That moment where he's looking at himself in the mirror. I was hoping to get there myself. But I hadn't made it. So it's a matter of living through the cinema I think.

A friend of mine sent me that line ["All this filming isn't healthy"] on a note when we were making Raging Bull (1980)! I think it was one of the cinematographers who had just seen Peeping Tom (1960). And there is no doubt that filmmaking is aggressive and it could be something that is not very healthy. When you make a film . . . there are times in your life when you're burning with a passion and it's very, very strong. It's almost like a pathology of cinema where you want to possess the people on film. You want to live through them. You want to possess their spirits, their souls, in a way. And ultimately you can't stop. It has to be done until you get to the bitter end. You're exhausted. In some cases friends might have died, in some cases they don't come back, in some cases they can't make another picture. The only thing to do is try to make another picture. It's got to be done again. Now, I don't mean to sound dramatic, a lot of great films are made that way. And we might not only be talking about cinema here. We could be talking about other things, too. I would think that it might apply to other art forms. But I must say, that with that passion and that power, there is pathology in wanting to live vicariously through the people.