Quotes

I'm not afraid to fail, providing I fail honorably. The only thing I don't want is to end up being an irrelevant 70-year-old egomaniac.

Nothing good will happen while there are still cinemas that are shit heaps and critics who only like popular films when they are thirty years old. [1975]

While our technical ability to communicate grows at an exponential rate, there seems to be no corresponding increase in our ability to understand each other.

The artist is a credulous animal. He is often a dreamer. And if he finds someone who appears to share his dream, or, even better, someone with the means to realize that dream, then that artist tends to believe in Santa Claus.

The last really great film about life was probably Fanny and Alexander (1982). It's the last time I saw a film where you thought I'm watching a film here by somebody who really understands the complexity of life, who's really trying to help me navigate my own way through what's going to be a tough next thirty, forty years.

[on Chariots of Fire (1981)] It's one of those films that transcended just being a movie. I wouldn't say it's up there with Gone with the Wind (1939), but I think it's of that ilk. Most British people my age or younger would put it in their Top 10. I was taken a little bit - well, maybe more than a little bit - by surprise by its success. I'd just come off the success of Midnight Express (1978), which was a totally different movie to Chariots of Fire, and I wanted to make a movie that meant a lot to me. And what the film offered was the opportunity to look at two sides of the human character. Both involved winning but winning for different reasons and through different means. And so in Eric Liddell and Howard Abrams we were able to capture quite a wide spectrum of people's ambitions and people identified quite closely with one or the other. I've had people come up to me and say, "Oh I really loved that film about the Jewish runner" and they wouldn't mention Liddell at all. And others would talk about Liddell and his principles and everything else. So people carved out the movie for themselves. They had their own version of Chariots of Fire - what spoke to them, whether it was the moment they punched the air in triumph or felt good about themselves inside. And in a world where professional sport is under such suspicion, the idea of sport being very clean and competitive the way that it was back in the 1920s is very attractive. It's the way people want to feel sport is. They're quite disturbed when they read about Lance Armstrong because it makes it nonsense becoming involved and very excited about sport. There's no point being excited about the guys who's winning if he's drugged up to the eyebrows. And I think there is a kind of yearning for the idea that sport should be just about excellence.