German - Director | November 6, 1931 - November 19, 2014
Directing is mystifying. It's a long, long, skid on an icy road, and you do the best you can trying to stay on the road... If you're still here when you come out of the spin, it's a relief. But you've got to have the terror if you're going to do anything worthwhile.
Mike Nichols
BestRoadTryingLongYouAnything
Oh my God, if I know anything, I know I'm gonna die! I never forget that. I know I'll be forgotten in a minute, and that's just fine with me.
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As a director, my job is, and always has been, divided into a number of things: dealing with the crew, the money and the studio, and the marketing and publicity. These are all different jobs that have to be learned and done as well as possible. The celebrity part rarely touches a director.
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My father wasn't too crazy about me. I loved him anyway. One of the things I regretted for a long time was that he died before he could see that he would be proud of me. I was actually more what he wished for than he thought.
FatherTimeMeCrazyProudThought
Things come in waves, and I'm always more interested in places like, for instance, Chicago, where people don't follow fashion. They're not galloping past your window on the way to the latest anything. They're living their lives. You do a play, they come and see it and say, 'That's nice', and then they go home.
HomePastPeopleWindowFashionYou
You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.
LearningPastCreativePeopleYou
I'm an enormous fan of 'The West Wing.' It was one of the very few shows I would watch every week.
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I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.
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The reason that most British actors are better than most American actors in the end is that they don't make any money. At the very end of their lives, they get into a space movie and they make a lot of money, but until that happens, basically, they don't have bank accounts. They live from day to day.
LiveMoneyDaySpaceEndBetter
A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.
TrustYouPersonLikeEitherMovie
I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.
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A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.
ChangeCharacterGreatEnjoyYou
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