Quotes

Making a film is like going down a mine--once you've started you bid a metaphorical goodbye to the daylight and the outside world for the duration.

What I tend to go for, and what interests me, is not the hero but the coward . . . not the success, but the failure.

[on his acting days] I wasn't a very good actor. I wouldn't have cast myself if I'd come to see myself.

A lot of claptrap is talked about The Method as though the British actor didn't have one. It's just that we tend to be quieter about it.

The days of dealing with one despot are over. Now it's clearly with a whole group of frightened committee people.

[on Hollywood] An extraordinary kind of temporary place.

To be a director, you have to be a very good actor, because you've got to leave actors with a shred of pleasure at doing what they're doing, and if they think you admire them and like them in the role, that's all for the good.

[on "Method" acting] [Dustin Hoffman] is a great believer in physical acting. Whenever we had to do a running scene--you know, most actors would just say, "Well, just dab a bit of glycerin on my face, and I'll look sweaty." Not so with Dustin. He had to run right round the 91st Street area of Central Park, so that he was really out of breath, which has always made me curious as to what they do when they're going to enact someone murdering somebody. Or having sex.

I like making films that have question marks in them and are not all tied up beautifully with a pink ribbon, even though that's what the audience seems to want, and if you give it to them there's more assurance of commercial success, perhaps. But that's never the way I've seen life or reflected life in what I want to put on the screen.

[on the stars of Darling (1965)] [Dirk Bogarde] was wonderful and was very nice to [Julie Christie] during the shoot. He became rather a bitter older man, I don't know why. But he was very embittered. We rather fell out as friends, which is sad, but it happens. Julie still remains a good friend of mine. As was Laurence Harvey, who died far too young.

[In 1981 interview] . . . I quite like the idea of wiping the smiles off people's faces . . .

[in a 1981 interview] I think the business is getting tougher, no question. It is an extraordinary fight to make something different. So it tends not so much to be films that you think are commercial, but films that people seem to want to make. [on Honky Tonk Freeway (1981)] EMI said, "We love the script. It's very original. We want to make it.".

It's no secret that Dustin Hoffman, who I regard as an absolutely splendid and inventive actor, is a packet of trouble, because he's got 60 answers to every question and he's never content to settle for one simple solution. Even when he's got it, he wants to try something else, just in case. That can be exhausting. It's like dealing with a child prodigy.

Of course I was astonished by the Oscar [for Midnight Cowboy (1969)]. In many minds, I should not have won. I had not made a picture that was approved by the old guard. We had to fight to get Cowboy made. Nobody wanted to make it. Then they gave us an X rating, but even that didn't stop us. We didn't cut a thing, and we said, 'This is it. This is the picture'. And then they nominated us, and then we won.

[responding to a question as to how an Englishman had the "monumental gall" to make a film like Midnight Cowboy (1969)] I myself thought at first that it was a bit cheeky for a foreigner with no real knowledge of New York City to attempt a definitive study of the male hustler's milieu. But I was so fascinated by James Leo Herlihy's novel that I knew I had to make the film. And perhaps rationalizing, I decided that someone not emotionally involved might be able to evoke its ambiance with a certain fresh perspective.

[on Karen Black, who he directed in The Day of the Locust (1975)] Karen's a fine actress, but completely insane.

I don't know if many people are aware that Warren Beatty wanted to play the [Midnight] Cowboy. Oh, yes, he really wanted the part. But I wanted an unknown, and Jon Voight was perfect - sexy enough but not glamorous like Beatty. Somehow seeing Warren Beatty fail as a hustler on Forty-Second Street would be sort of ludicrous.

[on Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), 1971] It's my story, my own bloody Sunday - my affair with a young man. Nothing like it, ever, has been put on the screen before. That kiss was going to be in close-up or not at all.