Manny Farber Quotes

Frank Miller is more of a visionary than any director I've ever worked with, and he achieves that vision better than anyone I've ever worked with.

For me the most moving moment came when I first started working on 2001. I was already in awe of him, and he had very much already become Stanley Kubrick by the time the film started.

The Weinsteins believe in test screenings. I don't. I don't think good films are made that way. Call me crazy, but I'd like to think you need a singular vision to make good art.

I'm not prejudiced about what type of movies I'm in, what form they take or whether they're studio or independent. I just want to make films that are going to be good.

I don't write plays for them to be turned into movies.

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.

The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'

As artists, I think that one of the good qualities we have is that we're imaginative. We're resourceful. We like challenges.

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.

I really tried to make movies I wanted to see. I thought that if I was good enough, somebody would always need me.

The thing about this business is that you always end up finding these amazing stories and these amazing people who make amazing films. I just want to work with good people and keep challenging myself with different kinds of characters.

In film, you're so much in the hands and at the mercy of the editor, so sometimes it's good to watch it just to see how it turns out - it can be so different than how you imagined it. But sometimes it's better to just let it go for your own sense of self worth.

Making movies is what I'm good at. Cinema is the means through which I can best express myself.

Theatre is like an actor's nectar, like how cinema is a director's medium.

My greatest dream is to make a film on 'The Fountainhead,' which I have been restraining from doing because it is so much in the mind, and I am yet to be able to decode that.

I wouldn't be making films if I just wanted to express some specific ideas; then I would be writing essays or something.

The camera would miss it all. A magnificent picture is never worth a thousand perfect words. Ansel Adams can be a great artist, but he can never be Shakespeare. His tools are too literal.

I wonder whether my bleak-o-meter is set differently from other people's. I have such passion for what I do that I can't see it as bleak. When people use that word, or “grim” or “gritty,” I just think, “Oh, come on, look a bit deeper.” My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something.

A good film to me is like lightning in a bottle. I used to think that meant hit and run. But then I've changed my definition about what lightning in a bottle means. I think it means that you wait for that surprising moment that you really didn't expect would happen, as good as it may have gone in rehearsal.

Anything is good painting material once you get to know it.

I think, as the writer, you're always going to mourn something [left out of a film]. But you also just want to know there's a good reason for it being left out. On the whole, you want to give something to somebody creative. The worst thing you can do is say, "Here, be creative, but do it like I want you to do it." I was always very mindful of that.

I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium.

A picture is finished when all trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared.

I think the books are the books. They were conceived as books. They weren't conceived as movies. When I write scripts, that's an idea and a situation that I think is a really good idea for a movie. When I'm writing a book, I'm not thinking, "Oh, this would be a great movie." This would be a very interesting book. And I think the books are things that cannot really be adapted into another medium.

I wanted to meet Orson Welles. So I was like, whatever, somehow get me in on this. I'm able to get cast in it, but Orson Welles worked alone. He worked before all of us worked. He didn't want to work with anyone else.