- I like movies that create discussion; I love it when they haven't forgotten about your movie by dinnertime and they're still arguing about it the next day - that's what a movie should do, it should create discussion.
- I'm fascinated by relationships and how they work or don't work. I'm much more interested in the small picture than the big one, because I think the minutiae and the breath in one's face are much more interesting than the landscape out there.
- I never understood how a director can impose a style on a movie. I think the drama within the scene should dictate the way it is shot.
- [on Mickey Rourke] He fascinates me. I can't take my eyes off him because he's never doing nothing.
- [on Lolita (1997)] I wanted to make a movie of Nabokov's novel, because it's, I think, one of the great novels of this century. In the end, it's a love story - it's a strange and awful love story. This subject seems to be the last taboo. I think that what the audience maybe will find disturbing is that they don't hate Humbert, at least they don't totally hate him - they kind of like him in some ways - and I think that this is disturbing for an audience to deal with and I think that that will create discussion. They want to hate him but they can't really. It's awful what he does to Lolita, obviously, but then they find themselves laughing with him and sometimes sympathizing with him and, ultimately, they understand that he really did love her. It would be much more convenient, much easier, if they just loathed him, if he was a monster. It's the most extraordinary mix; it makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you horrified and that's all you can want from a movie.
- Before I started my first film, Foxes (1980), with Jodie Foster, I rang up Howard Zieff, who was a very famous commercial director, and actually quite successful as a feature film director. I said, "What would you tell me? Give me some advice before I start this film." He thought for a long while and finally said: "Be on it at the end."
- I've always hated advertising, but I treated commercials as little films. I wasn't remotely interested in whether or not they sold the product, it was just a fabulous way for me to learn how to do it.
- People say, "Oh, you're good visually." Of course I care about that, but the only thing that is really important is the performances.
- I remember on Unfaithful (2002), there was a feeling from the studio at that time that they had to have a bad marriage in order for the relationship to work. But there would've been no drama in that at all. What was interesting was the fact that it was a good marriage and she had no reason at all to fuck around, but she did. So I like the arbitrary thing of that.
- [on his break from filmmaking between Unfaithful (2002) and Deep Water (2022)] I've got a farmhouse in the south of France, and I love it. I spent a lot of time in Provence. It's a difficult, seductive place to leave. I was living there, writing there, working on projects that didn't happen. I worked with writers on two or three, maybe more, projects that, for whatever reason, didn't come off. There was one that I wish I had done. I thought I needed more money to make the movie. I didn't think the budget of the movie was enough, but now, in retrospect, I should have done it at the price that they said they could do it at. I make mistakes. It was a heist movie and there was a love story in it. I thought it was an epic movie. That's why I thought that it needed more money and I needed a lot of time to do it.
- [on Deep Water (2022)] It's a very bizarre movie - certainly the strangest that I've done. It was complicated because the two characters are so bizarre that you are fighting to keep it not so surreal that it becomes unbelievable. There can't be a moment when the audience goes, "I don't believe that. That's silly. Now, you've lost me." And that's terribly easy to happen. So, this took a long while, just in terms of getting the pace right, and getting people to believe that this guy loved his snails. You have a daughter of five, sitting in the bath and saying, "Daddy, when Charlie drowned in the swimming pool, did his feet touch the ground?" And he says, "I don't know. I wasn't there." And she says, "Sure, you were there," and she's like a cop. I liked that. The scene is surreal, but you buy it.
- [on Deep Water (2022)] I liked the idea that this is a very strange and fucked-up love story, that somehow these people needed each other. I liked the bookend idea. I liked the idea that this could go on forever. You have to imagine their life afterward. I thought that it was a pity not to have a sense of complicity between these two people, so that when he's looking through the window, at the beginning, at her making out with a boyfriend at a party, she knows that he'll be watching. I thought it was a pity not to have a sense of complicity between her and him. I thought that was an element that it would have been a pity not to have. I liked that she came over to him, during the scene when Charlie De Lisle is playing the piano, and you wonder whether she feels sorry for him, or does she love him there. She sees him watching and she comes over, and there's that moment of sexuality between them. I thought that was interesting.
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