- Actors can be a terrible bore on the set, though I enjoy having dinner with them.
- I wouldn't take the advice of a lot of so-called critics on how to shoot a close-up of a teapot.
- Always cast against the part and it won't be boring.
- When the great actor says the line, you can put scissors precisely at the point A and it's wonderful. When the star says the line, you can hold for four frames longer because something else happens.
- [on the Academy Awards] If you have no hope of getting one, they're despised. But it you have, they're very important.
- Film is a dramatized reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real... an audience should not be conscious of technique.
- I think people remember pictures not dialogue. That's why I like pictures.
- [on Anthony Asquith] A hell of a good director.
- [on Charles Laughton] Charm, you see, a terrific man to work with. You had to hold him down a bit. What a talent!
- I like making films about characters I'd like to have dinner with.
- These American writers really frighten me. They talk so well and write so badly. I have now worked with five of them and not one has come along with a big, original idea.
- [on film adaptations] I think the best you can do in a movie is to be faithful to the author's intention in all areas. With the two Dickens films I did - Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) - they are, oh, pencil sketches of these great novels that he wrote, but I think they are faithful. I wouldn't have been ashamed to show him the films.
- [accepting the Best Director Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia (1962)] This limey is deeply touched and greatly honoured. Thank you.
- Casting is a nightmare because it is an eternal compromise. You hardly ever have the actor give a performance of which you say, yes, that's right on it. They just haven't got that sense of humour, or they haven't got that feel about them or whatever it is. The nearest person to a perfect piece of casting was Trevor Howard in Ryan's Daughter (1970). He was just wonderful for the tunnel-vision priest - a kind of peasant who knew exactly what was right and what was wrong and was therefore not all that intelligent.
- I find dialogue a bore, for the most part. I think that if you look back on any film you've seen, you don't remember lines of dialogue, you remember pictures.
- [on Doctor Zhivago (1965)] Zhivago is a very passive part - he's a poet and a doctor - and a fatal pitfall would have been to cast too much with the type. If I'd had a very studious young man, I think he'd tend to be a bore in the picture and so I thought I'd go for immense good looks and I thought of Omar (Sharif) because he'd played the Sheik in Lawrence who came out of the mirage. He's a very sensitive actor and we happen to work very well together - he catches on - and I think it works and I thought I could get this Russian poet out of him, and I backed that hunch. A lot of people thought I was mad.
- [1989, on the restored version of Lawrence of Arabia (1962)] Everyone worried about re-releasing Lawrence. They said the audiences have changed. They talk and shout at the screen; they're impatient; they wouldn't sit still for it. Not at all. You could hear a pin drop. London, New York, Washington, Los Angeles. Everywhere. I think audiences had almost forgotten the power of pictures. They've gotten smaller and smaller. And suddenly you see this old film, wonderfully photographed; tremendous detail; you almost feel you could take a hair off the actor's collar. There's a mesmeric effect from the picture on the screen.
- [on Doctor Zhivago (1965)] That film earned me more money than all my other films put together. It's a wonderful story - you want to know what happens next. And wonderful characters. And Julie (Christie).....which was quite a face.
- I realise more and more that reality on the screen, which used to be the thing to aim at, is a sort of bore. I don't mean that the audience should sit there and say, "Oh, that's unreal". But movies are a kind of dream and I think they should have an unreal edge to them, and that's what I try to do.
- [1988 interview] I don't know about Brief Encounter (1945). I saw it the other day and I thought it was rather good, and I saw it a couple of years ago and I thought it was pretty awful. The magic of that film is Celia Johnson - she was wonderful!
- I suppose I don't have much contact with actors off the set because I have so much contact with them on the set. I'm trying to get things out of them - I'm squeezing them a little, I'm encouraging them - I'm a general sort of wet-nurse to actors.
- [shortly before his death from cancer, to friend John Boorman] Haven't we been lucky, John? They let us make movies.
- I want to make something that if I went to the cinema and it wasn't me, I'd enjoy watching.
- One of the fascinations about the cinema is that the lights went down, you were in the dark - it's very private - and I used to turn and look at that beam going through the tobacco smoke and it still holds a kind of fascination for me - I don't know why - it's part of the magic show I think. And that beam showed me places I thought I'd never visit. I've been terribly lucky and I have visited them. It showed me characters, I met all sorts of people i.e. the characters on the screen, that I'd never meet in my ordinary, dull, suburban life.
- [on his background as an editor] It's everything. I often wonder at directors who've never been editors. I just don't understand how they go to work. I kind of piece it together as we're making it. And editing is one of the, if not the, chief of the tools of my trade.
- [1988 interview, asked if he was pleased with A Passage to India (1984)] Sort of.
- [on working with Alec Guinness on A Passage to India (1984)] I think Alec could perfectly well have played an Indian. I think he got scared of it. I remember him saying to me once, "I think you're asking me to give an imitation of Peter Sellers", which in fact I wasn't. So I don't think that was one of his best performances.
- [interview on the set of A Passage to India (1984)] He's a writer, I'm a filmmaker. I like movies, and I've tried to make a movie that I would like to see. The end is different, certainly, but I think I wouldn't be ashamed for Forster to read the script. I think I stuck with his characters, and on the whole, given the limitations of time, I mean what's one doing? One's doing something in 2 hours, a book that thick, it's a sort of sketch of it, and I'm extracting a movie from it. Those who want to read Forster, read the book. Those who want to go to a movie, and don't read, come and see our film.
- I like spectacle. When I say spectacle, I don't think you can just put on a load of spectacle and expect it to be successful with the public; of course you've got to have a foreground action, and it's awfully easy for critics to say "Oh the background swamped the foreground", but I don't think I've done that.
- [on Ryan's Daughter (1970)] Now people like it very much and they can't believe it got such terrible notices. I think people didn't like it because they said, "Oh, it's David Lean doing another epic" and in this country particularly I think, if you do anything big and expensive you really are suspected quite a lot. It's in our upbringing, isn't it? Don't show off. And in a vague sort of way - and this is a quick answer - I think making a great big epic with a lot of money is showing-off.
- [on his break from filmmaking after Ryan's Daughter (1970)] I was very stupid as a matter of fact. This may not be the most brilliant film, but I think it's quite a good film and it got horrific notices. After the notices I got on that picture I was really quite nervous of going into a restaurant. The power of print is certainly true. The reviews were just abusive. I don't think there was one good notice for Ryan's Daughter - really, not one. And I thought, "Why am I doing this?", rather stupidly. And I went off and I started travelling. I went to every conceivable sort of place, I bought a house in Rome. I love gardening; I did gardening and that sort of thing.
- [1988 interview] I just love movies and I would like to make good movies. And I think part of making of a good movie, or the greater part of it, is a good story - which I know is out of fashion - and good characters. I mean, in the old days, when one went to the movies, one used to feel that one had been out and met some fascinating people. I saw the other day The Untouchables (1987) on a aeroplane, and to be quite honest, I didn't really like it at all.
- [on his unmade adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Nostromo] I have a tremendous respect for Nostromo as a classic novel, but this respect could cause me to make a not so good, old-fashioned film. Instead I would like to use the book as a basis for a modern movie, which will make the audience sit up straight with surprise.
- [on Nostromo] It will be a great big spectacular picture which also includes characters. It's such a complicated novel. I think we've got a damn good movie out of it, using the basic idea, but they can certainly say you've dropped out this and dropped out that. But, I say, we're trying to get it in not more than 2 hours and 45. It's very difficult, this business, it may be foolish even to attempt it, but I don't feel very apologetic because all movies are based on the book. If you take any damned book, except a short story, you have got to cut huge sections of it.
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