Milos Forman Quotes

I don't think anyone could write about another culture and get it 100 percent accurate.

Some Indians will come up and say that a story reminded them of something very specific to their experience. Which may or may not be the case for non-Indians.

In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.

I was offered and accepted a part in 'A Few Best Men,' and then the Australian actor's union argued that there were too many British actors. And the director decided to lose me.

Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality.

The BAFTAs give the British point of view, and the Oscars give the American point of view, but the truth is we're all working in an international industry.

I'd like to set a story in Australia, but I would need to feel confident my German and U.S. readers, for example, would stay with me.

Some things are really sacred and important to other cultures, so you have to be aware, politically, about those things before you just adopt them.

Some Mexicans go to Hollywood and lose career in Mexico because they play imitation. I don't want this to happen to me.

I think it's time British filmmakers stopped allowing themselves to be colonized so ruthlessly by U.S. ideas and stopped looking so slavishly to the U.S. market. It demeans filmmaking when they do that.

The television anchorman Dan Rather turns up in rag-top native drag in Afghanistan, the surrogate of our culture with his camera crew, intrepid as Sir Richard Burton sneaking into Mecca.

I find the working pattern to be the same in Bollywood as well as Tollywood. Especially because most directors of photography from the Telugu industry operate in Bollywood, too.

As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.

Others think their American ways will work in other countries. That's not always accurate and can be disrespectful to the local culture.

I'm the first Icelandic director who started working on U.S. movies. There are others behind me now, but it's like when Bjork opened the door for Icelandic musicians to work abroad. We're such a closed-off country, but Bjork broke the spell. And I'm glad it was a woman who did it. She showed us we could break this barrier.

Most Americans I play for are clueless as to who Richard Ramirez was, so you can imagine how audiences in Portugal react. I'm not saying they don't enjoy the music; I'm just saying they're a little lost on some references.

You can't escape culture. You can learn about it. You can criticize it. You can try to move it slowly. But at the end of the day, you can't actually opt out of the culture that you're in.

Had I guessed the trouble my name was going to cause a lot of people on the other side of the world, I would have changed it to something easier when I began writing books.

Well, I think by and large, certainly in terms of cinema, American culture dominates our cinema, mainly in the films that are shown in the multiplexes but also in the way that it has a magnetic effect on British films.

I was not grown up in the U.S., nor in Japan. In order to create a video game that people around the globe can enjoy and relate to, I can't draw things deeply rooted in the local culture that I'm not familiar with. That's why we are not doing games about football or samurai.

Zef is the underbelly of the Afrikaans culture, but it also, like, is Afrikaans culture.

Even if Pearl S. Buck hadn't spent most of her life in China, she'd have every right to write about it.

Doing any kind of culture in America in which you are not trying to affirm a European aesthetic is war.

There isn't only one way that black art or entertainment is represented, and that's the most important thing. We're permeating every style. We're claiming and, when necessary, appropriating all kinds of forms. Nothing is forbidden, because it's not what black people do: because it's not what we think of as black art.

I jumped off a bridge in Italy, is that culturally insensitive? Is saying 'mamma mia' culturally insensitive?