Takashi Miike Quotes

Each time you see a Western movie, it's a good reflection of where things are in the world at that time. It's probably one of the purest forms of cinema that really tells you where the world is.

One hundred percent, I mean, many of the Sergio Leone movies were with Clint Eastwood, and that's what it is.

So our films had a lot more to them than entertainment value, and I'm glad that a lot of people recognize that now. People realize now the value of them as educational.

I've always been a fan of Westerns, but my favorite kind of Westerns mostly were Sam Peckinpah's Westerns, and they mainly took place in the West that was changing.

Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.

I think that in the realm of commercial, popcorn cinema, the amount of message or smuggling of ideas you can get in there is quite limited. Like, if you think you're going to make a difference or change anything, you're on pretty dangerous thin ice.

The only thing I've kind of missed is finding a really good western that I want to do, because I watched westerns a lot.

As a child, I was subjected to a lot of spaghetti Westerns and hated them. I wanted the Indians to win - or just not be so sad!

'Downton Abbey' didn't have the impact it had just because it was a good story about people. It was something about that period and that world that was fascinating to people on a level that wasn't just as an entertainment.

Sergio Leone was a big influence on me because of the spaghetti westerns.

Films with a message just make me laugh.

I love the Western genre. In fact, one of my dreams is to play a cowboy on screen, like Clint Eastwood. I don't think it's going to happen, but you can always hope.

I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.

As an audience member, those studio films are fun. I like an adventure tale, and I also like to go see something that has more of a social pulse. I like to keep learning and trying new things. And if the scripts are good, it doesn't really matter.

The Oscars are about the dynamics of that moment, of that season. It reflects what's been going on in the world every year through the movies. And a lot of times, what's popular at the movies is popular because of what's going on in the world at that moment.

I am a genre lover - everything from spaghetti western to samurai movie.

The thing that makes a great genre movie is one that's not just entertainment, not just horror or sci-fi or whatever. The ones I love are the genre pictures with some subversive message underlying it all.

I want to make it clear: it's not that I hate mainstream cinema. It's perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult situations, so they have the right to escape from the world. But this has nothing to do with an art form.

Nothing's ever allowed to just be entertaining. We have to talk about it.

To look for some kind of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - well there's plenty of other places where you should probably look first before you start looking for it in a pop song.

To me, it wasn't 'Star Wars' that shaped me; it was more 'Mary Tyler Moore' and, nowadays, 'Louie' and 'Girls.'

I watched westerns when I was a kid, like everybody else, but I wasn't a total nerd or geek about it. I kind of fell in love with westerns heavily when I started watching Sergio Leone's westerns.

I love westerns. I've always wanted to do a western.

If you want to know what's going on in America, you have to watch soap operas.

If you look at how people use the term 'western,' you can only conclude that it means a movie that has big hats and horses. And if you really want to sound like you've been thinking, then you'll use a term like 'genre.' But all the hell it seems to mean is big hats and horses. Which is not all that deeply analytical.