Quotes

I suppose I'm the boy who stood on the burning deck whence all about he had fled. The trouble is I don't know whether the boy was a hero or a bloody idiot.

[speaking in 1986] The modern perception of British cinema has nothing to do with British films--merely with the business of getting more money through the box office.

[speaking at age 61] In the morning I feel about 50; then, depending on how the day goes, I might get down to about 22. When I'm directing on stage, I'm 43 and 32 when making a film because I feel less in control. Acting? Oh, then I'm 24. And when I'm on my own, I feel about 17 and think the world is all before me.

To make a film is to create a world.

[on Samuel Goldwyn] There are lucky ones whose great hearts, shallow and commonplace as bedpans, beat in instinctive tune with the great heart of the public, who laugh as it likes to laugh, weep the sweet and easy tears as it likes to weep . . . Goldwyn is blessed with that divine confidence in the rightness (moral, aesthetic, commercial) of his own intuition--and that, I suppose, is the chief reason for his success.

Directing Bette Davis was like playing with a very sharp knife. She met the world like an enemy: to collaborate was to concede. She had the charm of vitality, but there was the threat of cruelty as well. Even if she wasn't offensive, she conveyed the fact that ant any moment she might be.

[about Pauline Kael]: Just a high-pressure bitch.

[speaking in 1990] I don't exist any more as a British film-maker. I have never had a nomination, not that I give a damn, from the British Film Academy. That is perfectly OK because I know what I do is not to the English taste - fuck 'em.