“You don’t put your personal viewpoints in a good movie. A movie should only be concerned with characters, not some big moral, although it’s always underneath.”
“Nico was peculiar. She was extraordinary.”
“If a person is in front of a camera, they’re acting. It’s not possible to live in front of a camera.”
“You can’t have the real thing on camera – that’s the nature of cinema. When you see people like Daniel Day-Lewis and Ralph Fiennes screaming and hyperventilating, you’re seeing the phoniest kind of bad acting. You may as well have a ‘men at work’ sign. It’s not acting if you can see it.”
“Every movie I’ve ever made says the same thing. They all find comedy in people trying to live their lives without any rules.”
“Actors should be instinctive and spontaneous. If you think about acting, you’re not going to be good.”
“A good conservative is someone with an open mind.”
“I think it’s absurd to believe that movies should look like paintings and say something like serious books say something.”
“Rome has New York’s formlessness, aimlessness, a kind of hard-boiled sophistication, blase about everything. In their filmmaking, too, the Italians have this tongue-in-cheek sense of comedy.”
“I was brought up with TV comedians. I’ll remember them till I go to my grave, all those comedians, as decadent fluff.”
“If I thought about planning, I’d plan movies. If I thought about planning my life, I’d plan my life more rationally, not like New Yorkers who live their lives so irrationally, without reason. Maybe that’s the connection between my movies and New York: the movies have the same kind of lack of overall design.”
“I like the idea of stepping back into another time period.”
“The Democrats tax anything that moves.”
“Andy was a character, and the two of us did have some things in common. We appreciated funny things, didn’t like serious things.”
“Even Andy never hung his own paintings. He’d sell them or put them in a box.”
“It’s good to aggravate people a little. It makes them pay attention.”
“I’ve always been an independent producer. I’d kind of like to be hired help for a change. I don’t mind that.”
“I never wanted to be anything special. I just wanted to make films.”
“Most of the time, I leave the camera on the obvious special effects, like the rubber bodies, so that it become obvious they’re not real.”
“Andy always thought that films would be where we’d make money.”
“Andy was not a hippie or rebel but more like a mischievous child. He was never out to destroy everything. He became a New Yorker, and New Yorkers know, like the media, what’s going on around them is a fashion thing that will change to something else.”
“What made Andy famous was the years I managed him. I created the Velvet Underground and told him not to worry about them because they would help his career. All those things I did created his fame.”
“The people of Pittsburgh should have a weekend flea market at the Warhol. Andy would have loved that kind of stuff.”
“Andy was an offbeat personality, shy and insecure. The whole reason for taking a camera with him wherever he went was because he was so shy. He’d break the ice by taking pictures.”
“I adore jokes. They’re a theatrical contrivance, but the irony of all fiction is that you approach reality by avoiding it a bit; you spoof it a bit.”
“Andy was a nonverbal person; you couldn’t get directions out of him. All he knew was what was modern in art was what wasn’t art: The telephone was art, the pizza was art, but what was hanging on walls in museums wasn’t art.”
“My films always play better outside of New York, especially to critics.”
“There’s something about all the films that I have made in that they don’t seem old or dated, and some people mention that.”
“People treat serious subjects so seriously, which is so obvious a way of dealing with them. I’m always thinking that the best way of dealing with them is to show people as human beings.”
“I’ve always stayed independent, but I’ve always felt an obligation to make movies an untutored audience could like.”
“So many things go on in life that never find their way into the movies because so much of it is unappealing. But that’s what I want to show.”
“I’m not against censorship in principle. Not at all. Some things should be censored.”
“I’m not anti-Hollywood; not at all. In fact, I’m rather fascinated by everything that goes on here. When I get hold of a copy of ‘Variety,’ I read it cover to cover; I love to know what people are doing.”
“It’s a debilitating process, working with the studios. With the length of time it takes for drafts and development deals, your enthusiasm is gone before you’re ready to make the film.”
“Andy was not a director and not a writer. He operated the camera a little bit, and he wasn’t even so good at that.”
“Somewhere in the ’60s, actors became wimps and basket-case psychotics.”
“We are always getting photos and publicity from people who want to act in Andy’s movies. We always throw them away. They don’t seem to realize that the last thing we’d put into a movie is an actor. Because all the other movies use actors.”
“I did say to myself one day, ‘I’d love to be a Jewish comedian,’ but that’s my only memory with any connection to show business.”
“Very few people took sordid things and made comedies out of them.”
“My sense is that you can make a film under almost any circumstances. As long as someone has a vague idea of what he’s doing, something distinctive will emerge. That, to me, is what film making is all about.”
“Andy wasn’t capable of any complicated thoughts or ideas. Ideas need a verb and a noun, a subject. Andy spoke in a kind of stumbling staccato. You had to finish sentences for him. So Andy operated through people who could do things for him. He wished things into happening, things he himself couldn’t do.”
“I love Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton, but not Charlie Chaplin.”
“I’ve been the movie business for over 50 years, and I’ve done everything imaginable that could be done or ever was done by anybody.”
“It’s not a secret, but if you know what the hell you’re doing, you pick good actors. And you know what makes a good actor? A good personality in the performer, in the person.”
“None of my films are comparable to anybody else’s. So many years after I made them, nobody’s been able to copy them.”
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