भाव

(Referring to the restroom murder scene in विटनेस (1985): It was the most violent scene I've ever filmed. I still wonder if it was too violent, but I did want to have an outrage over the violence that occured in front of those innocent eyes [of the Amish boy character].

[on Harrison Ford] Harrison possesses magnetic qualities. He is capable of filling a room with his personality. If he'd been a plumber and came to fix your tap, he's a person you'd notice. We provoke each other. It's no cozy fireside chat.

[on Mel Gibson] Mel is the new Australian. He is going to be a very good star. He is quite different from the Australian everyone knows -- the kind Rod Taylor represents.

What I can't do is what I consider children's films, infantile subject matter. The caped-crusader-type stuff is not for me...When I began making films, they were just movies.'What's the new movie? What are you doing?' Now they're called 'adult dramas'. Sounds like a porno film because the majority of the marketplace is devoted to children.

[on Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)] You often do what you like yourself, and I like not knowing and not making sense. You can mix in certain sensitivities as a filmmaker. Hitchcock said whodunnits were the most difficult things because the ending is usually so disappointing. The butler did it? We had to create a style in which the audience didn't want that ending. What interested me was the fact that people disappear every day, seemingly into thin air sometimes, and they're never heard from again. It's a particular kind of suspense for those left behind. And it's very important in many cultures to bury the body and have a sense of closure when someone dies. We like closure. We want to go to the funeral. With disappearance, you never have that. Movies tie things up in an arbitrary length of time, but I have always liked things that aren't fully realised. I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, but I remember being disappointed when he'd come up with these simple explanations for these complex mysteries. I was always fascinated by the mystery itself, as opposed to the answer behind it.

[interview] I'm still amazed how you can put your pen down and think not a line can be changed... You've finally got it right. You pick it up ten days later, and it's all so bad.

I don't think I have any sort of master plan. I work intuitively.

Whenever I've written a script for an American studio or financier, or rewritten a script which already has accredited writers, I'll drop dialogue. Executives in the U.S. often find this puzzling because the story isn't explicable without the dialogue, and that's how they read a script - they read the dialogue and scan the descriptions, which are usually pretty basic. I tend to expand the descriptions and cut the dialogue.

Get the right actor, and the job's halfway done. I've only miscast major people twice in my life - out of respect to them, I won't tell you who. After a couple of days' shooting, I had to tell them I was letting them go. It was hideous.

Music is the fountainhead: everything comes from that. At the moment, I'm getting intoxicated on Beethoven, and I use Pink Floyd for inspiration while making a film. Their music contains a sound for almost everything I do.

[when asked whether or not he storyboards] I did on that picture, and some on the new one. But I never really enjoy it. I'm probably a victim of my experience, which is standing beside the camera on location. And I like to make changes on the day, even in action sequences. Which probably has something to do with my background in sketch comedy, where you had to ad-lib, to change things constantly. If you've cast a picture right and you don't have script problems-those are the two essentials-then on the day you have this little piece of life in the story you're telling and anything can happen.

[on his 'noticeboard' way of working]: You keep a noticeboard and on it you put anything that strikes you - for whatever reason, it makes an impression. Maybe it's just a picture of a jockey in the sporting section - his face, you can't think what it is, but it strikes you. Cut it out, pin it up. After a few months you have maybe four or five items and sometimes they fall into a pattern and there's your idea.

The only commercial aspect that concerns me is accessibility. I want to present a movie that people from varying backgrounds can find something in.

The thing is that I'm just not a good director unless I'm somehow obsessed with what I'm doing, like I was with 'Picnic'.

[on Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)]: I'd never approached theatre or books as a source of film material. But Joan Lindsay's book really excited me. I was utterly taken in by the disappearance of the schoolgirls. The support ideas were good - English culture in Australia, the period setting - but the disappearance was the thing, the implications of it ... the story gripped me in the same way [as Lindsay] ... Is the story based on fact? I would say it's not literally true. But it is a truth, because people do disappear. My films are very much concerned with this - that what people think is fantasy is fact and the facts so often fantasies - it's all a matter of points of view.

I don't want to pose cinematic puzzles. For one thing it's too easy to appear clever and enigmatic. In fact I did that in some of my earlier films and got far more credit than I deserved. Some of the imaginations of my audience were greater than my concept. ... Someone comes up to you and says, 'That shot when someone turned the doorknob. Stunning,' they say. 'Brilliant. The whole thing depended on it.' And you're thinking 'doorknob, what doorknob?'

[on working with university friend Grahame Bond] Grahame and I became close working partners. We did stuff for revues, including a couple of radio and TV pilots, and we wrote the original 'Aunty Jack Show' for radio. It was planned to replace the children's club show, 'The Argonauts'.