Quotes

It's very eclectic, the way one chooses subjects in the movie business, especially in the commercial movie business. You need to develop material yourself or material is presented to you as an assignment to direct.

I feel that my job is to create an atmosphere where creative people can do their best work. In other words, I have to create an atmosphere where these people feel safe, where they feel respected, and where they feel that they can contribute.

There are two things I will never do in my life. I will never climb Mount Everest, and I will never work with Val Kilmer again. There isn't enough money in the world. - in Premiere magazine, April 1997. (Frankenheimer directed the 1996 film The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), which starred Val Kilmer, with whom he reportedly had personal differences.)

On referring to Val Kilmer and his personal feelings about him while making The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996): Will Rogers never met Val Kilmer.

No one ever looked like Burt Lancaster in "The Crimson Pirate. [on the impressive physique of friend Lancaster]

[on Kirk Douglas] He's wanted to be Burt Lancaster all his life.

Many of my films concern the individual trying to find himself in society and trying to maintain his individuality in a mechanized world. I do feel that society wants everybody to be exactly the same. It's so much easier. I think the theme of the indomitability of the human spirit is very much there, and the fight against regimentation. When we talk about life my philosophy is that you have to live your life the way it is. You can change it but you can't change who you are or what you've done before. And you have to live with that. I think that point was very well brought out in Seconds (1966), that's what the film is all about.

[on Alfred Hitchcock] Any American director who says he hasn't been influenced by him is out of his mind.

[on Alfred Hitchcock] When I say I have been influenced by Hitchcock, I think every director in a certain way has been influenced by Hitchcock, because in many of his films, you find those marvellous moments; but I've never been fulfilled by a Hitchcock film. I would certainly never want to be Hitchcock, and would never want to make films like his because I think they're meaningless. I think all those kind of "after the fact" and "in depth" studies of Hitchcock are ludicrous. If ever there was a commercial director, it was Hitchcock. He's terribly good, but also terribly glib and really a very surface director. I don't think his films contain deep motivations. It's very easy to read things into certain films. He's a clever man and gifted and I often think of what he could have achieved if his talents had been directed toward something more meaningful.

I'm a filmmaker... I like to work.