Mike Nichols
In a weird way, when I was looking back, I didn't know I was going to be a director until I was.
If you lose a parent, it never goes away. As a kid, I dreamed about my father coming back for 15 or 20 years. I still do sometimes.
I loved all movies, literally. I certainly loved 'Shane' and 'Roxie Hart.' Later on, when I was less of a kid, I loved 'L'Avventura' and 'Persona' and all Fellini movies and like everybody else I loved John Ford. Then and now, I loved Preston Sturges, maybe above anyone.
Technically, maybe I learned most of all from George Stevens, and among his movies I learned the most from 'A Place in the Sun.' It's a lesson in moviemaking.
I had a high school girlfriend whose mother gave us theater tickets, so I saw the second night performance of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' My girl and I could not get up during intermission, we were so stunned. To this day it's the only thing I've seen on stage that's 100 percent real and 100 percent poetic simultaneously.
Limitations are inspiring: they lead to thinking, so I don't mind them.
Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.
'Streetcar' is no longer about the moment at all. There is no Blanche DuBois anywhere; south, north, east or west. We don't have Blanche DuBois at the moment. But we have Willy Loman; everywhere we look we see Willy Loman. We are Willy Loman. We're on Facebook; we need to be known; we're selling all the time.
Improvisation has to do with exploring something like two brothers in a room together. You find out things about situations by discovering the things that they aren't saying. It's a way to explore scenes. Sometimes it's more useful than others, but it's always there to see if there's anything that you might improve.
Whether something is a success or not has never had much to do with what you do next.
There's nothing in the American dream about character. It's a serious flaw.
A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.
People, by and large, would rather be talking than listening.
Very often when a story really holds us, it gets pushed away because it's too close for comfort.
I still think that luck is what a lot of the good things come from. It's simply the luck of where you are, when.
Here's the most mysterious thing to me. I look back at those first plays I did and the first movies I did, and I only have one question, which is, 'What was I so confident about? Where did I get that?
I'm anything but confident.
Oh my God, if I know anything, I know I'm gonna die! I never forget that. I know I'll be forgotten in a minute, and that's just fine with me.
I am drawn to the mystery of marriage. You can never know what the contract is between two people, and that is a very strong subject. I think it may be my subject.
As a director, my job is, and always has been, divided into a number of things: dealing with the crew, the money and the studio, and the marketing and publicity. These are all different jobs that have to be learned and done as well as possible. The celebrity part rarely touches a director.
My father wasn't too crazy about me. I loved him anyway. One of the things I regretted for a long time was that he died before he could see that he would be proud of me. I was actually more what he wished for than he thought.
Any good movie is filled with secrets.
Stand-up comedy is a very hard thing on the spirit. There are people who transcend it, like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, but in its essence, it's soul-destroying. It tends to turn people into control freaks.
Things come in waves, and I'm always more interested in places like, for instance, Chicago, where people don't follow fashion. They're not galloping past your window on the way to the latest anything. They're living their lives. You do a play, they come and see it and say, 'That's nice', and then they go home.
I'm an enormous fan of 'The West Wing.' It was one of the very few shows I would watch every week.
I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.
The reason that most British actors are better than most American actors in the end is that they don't make any money. At the very end of their lives, they get into a space movie and they make a lot of money, but until that happens, basically, they don't have bank accounts. They live from day to day.
A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.
American society to me and my brother was thrilling because, first of all, the food made noise. We were so excited about Rice Krispies and Coca-Cola. We had only silent food in our country, and we loved listening to our lunch and breakfast.
I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.
It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.
It's very weird about movies: you never know which ones are going to stay alive and which one are going to be meaningless. When you're there, you couldn't possibly predict it. Some things slowly die, and others slowly stay a while.
All the theories that acting is reacting to imaginary circumstances as though they are real, and directing is turning psychology into behavior, those are all stabs at something that can't be taught. All the great actors can't talk about what they do, and they don't want to begin to talk about it. They just do it.
There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.Collection: Falling In Love
I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That’s the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.Collection: Jobs
The only safe thing is to take a chance. Play safe and you are dead. Taking risks is the essence of good work, and the difference between safe and bold can only be defined by yourself since no one else knows for what you are hoping when you embark on anything.Collection: Essence
The unconscious is our best collaborator.Collection: Consciousness
No doubt you are as alarmed as I by the tragic decline in America's language skills. If 10 people read the following sentence: Two tanker trucks has just overturned in Alaska, spilling a totel of 10,000 gallons of beer onto a highway. two would find an error in subject-verb agreement, two would find an error in spelling, and six would find a sponge and drive north.Collection: Beer
I love the editing process of making movies. I just wish that life had one.Collection: Editing
I have never understood people dividing things into dramas and comedies.Collection: Drama
The only safe thing in filmmaking is to take a chance.Collection: Safe
In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams. The unconscious is our best collaborator.Collection: Dream
Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report, There's a naked person outside!Collection: Phones
That seems to me the greatest American danger we're all in, that we'll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.Collection: Alive
I was just trying to make a nice little movie... It wasn't until I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.Collection: Nice
Yes. The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny.Collection: Laughter
Will we allow the decline of our language-the language of Shakespeare, Shaw and Steinbeck? Will we abuse our precious gift of communication? Will we bite our mother tongue with the teeth of indifference, crushing the taste buds of clarity and, without prompt application of the antiseptic of education, causing the gangrene of strained metaphors? Stand up, America, and let me hear your answer: Ain't no way, dude!Collection: Crush
Jewish introspection and Jewish humor is a way of surviving . . . if you're not handsome and you're not athletic and you're not rich, there's still one last hope with girls, which is being funny.Collection: Girl
It's not a filmmaker's job to explain his technique but to tell his story the best way he can.Collection: Jobs