Robert Towne
One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama.
You're dumber than you think I think you are.
And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made.
But time has caught up with it and I think vindicated it. Shampoo, too: very dark, very ambitious movie.
But, uh, censorship at that time said that you just absolutely couldn't do anything involving children and so we had to go from there. I don't remember what I changed it to. Duvall is just excellent in it.
Finally, Colin Farrell showed up on my doorstep, only he wasn't Colin Farrell - he was just this Irish kid who had read the script and wanted to do it.
I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.
I'm excited and encouraged to see people getting involved with their public lands and forests. We really need the public's help to repair these heavily used recreation sites.
If you have a good ear for dialogue, you just can't help thinking about the way people talk. You're drawn to it. And the obsessive interest in it forces you to develop it. You almost can't help yourself.
It made me alive to the fact that the most important thing sometimes is what isn't said - to prepare for moments of revelation that can be read entirely on actors' faces without dialogue.
It was not possible to film in California, because all the areas are heavily built up now. Coming to Cape Town is an invitation to step into the past and recreate Los Angeles of the 1930s.
Now they're attracted to one another, but repelled by their ethnic origins, so that there was something to overcome. They had to overcome their own prejudices, which had been imposed by the culture - their own shame at being Mexican and Italian.
You're torn between wanting to fill in all the spaces and knowing that's really going to screw up the screenplay. And yet, how are you going to communicate it to people who really don't understand the process?
Good dialogue illuminates what people are not sayingCollection: People
The straight roads are the roads of progress, the crooked roads are thee roads of genius.Collection: Progress
In dramatic writing, the very essence is character change. The character at the end is not the same as he was at the beginning. He's changed-psychologically, maybe even physically.Collection: Writing
What makes screenplays difficult are the things that require the most discipline and care and are just not seen by most people. I'm talking about movement - screenwriting is related to math and music, and if you zig here, you know you have to zag there. It's like the descriptions for a piece of music - you go fast or slow or with feeling. It's the same.Collection: Math
Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.Collection: Respect
Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.Collection: Water
I think Los Angeles certainly grew out and grew up, but I don't think it matured. It lost the appeal and the hunger and the beauty of its adolescence and went straight to a middle-aged ugly, overfed monster seeking mindless pleasure and being obsessively acquisitive. It's so materialistic. It grew up, but it didn't mature.Collection: Thinking
The one thing you know when you're shooting a script - and I've been on a lot of sets - is space is in a script, and the distance between the page and the stage is so enormous that it is unbelievable how even the brightest people can misread your intent or not see it altogether. Scripts have air in them. Scripts are supposed to leave things up to interpretation, but people can misread things enormously, so sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to put on the screen what you had in mind.Collection: Distance
People who can't think of anything else but whether the person you love is indented or convex should be doomed not to think of anything else but that, and so miss the other ninety-five percent of life.Collection: Gay
Relative to the power that movie stars have, and producers and directors, I would say that even the most respected screenwriters have very little power in Hollywood. I don't think it's in the nature of the writer's profession to go after that power. Writers spend their time alone, hallucinating, writing, making these things up, while these other people are out schmoozing, making connections, meeting each other. They are trotting the corridors of power and making sure they've put their own imprints in it. And they're promoting themselves and their images, as they should.Collection: Writing
If you can find meaning in the type of running you need todo to stay on this team, chances are you can find meaning in another absurd pastime: Life.Collection: Running
Black pride. Gay pride. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant pride. All of these things, you know, they're polarized, aren't they? The red and blue states. Christians, that's the most insidious aspect of it, giving into this great Christian image of America. That's the most frightening thing of all. Whereas in the past they're trying to find things that unite us, to minimize the differences. Whereas today there's this belief in empowerment and entitlement by maximizing differences. I'm not so sure that that's healthy.Collection: Christian
I'm not supposed to be the one that's caught with his pants down.Collection: Pants
I'm not in business to be loved, but I am in business.Collection: Business
Larry Grobel senses there are no answers in life, only questions. Good ones.Collection: Answers