Richard Belzer Quotes

Setting a movie in an earlier age gives it a mythical quality.

While I appreciate horror movies, I'd love the opportunity to do something transformative, especially because people see me as contemporary. There's a lot to explore in my career that could take me back to another time. A period piece would be an incredible game of dress-up, too.

The 1970s 'Wonder Woman' was sort of a kitsch thing. It was a very specific time for that, and it's hard to modernize something like that.

'Grease' is an awesome movie. I wish they'd make a new one, more for our time. The graphics are terrible when you look back on it.

At one time, MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated.

I'm really fascinated with anything that takes place between the 1920s up through the 1960s. In some ways it feels familiar, and in other ways it feels like it's from another planet.

You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.

The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years, was a transitional period in American youth culture.

I had a great '70s. I survived it, and that's always good news.

I've not worn a dress since about 1985. It always amazes me how there is still a fascination for it in England. The rest of the world doesn't seem to care. I'm not sure whether they don't remember or whether they've just moved on from it. I was brought up in the glam era.

With 'Bright Star' and with 'The Piano,' too, I felt a kind of sadness about it being in such a different era, because of my lack of experience with the era. And one of the ways I'd get over it is to remind myself that every film, even if it's contemporary, creates its own world.

I was pretty young when I saw the original 'Planet of the Apes', and for a time in the seventies, I was pretty obsessed with it.

Old film-noir movies. There's something comforting about watching black-and-white movies, and hearing this kind of music just puts me in a fantasy world. It's a really great escape for me.

I've tried to make 'Strictly Ballroom' impossible to date. It does feel a bit '80s but I consciously made sure there was no technology in the movie that could date it.

You don't automatically assume everyone will fall for a period drama.

I think the '70s are always inspiring to me. I was born then, so I have a lot of memories about how my parents were and what kinds of movies I was watching.

It's deliberate that a lot of my films have been period pieces.

It's said that most Americans under the age of 30 reflexively dislike movies made before 1970, especially those that were shot in black and white. If this is so, I suspect it's because such films portray an America that no longer exists.

Nowadays, if you have a mustache, people look at you like you're crazy. But when I was growing up, I never saw my dad without a mustache.

How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.'

What I think happens today is that a lot of filmmakers look at other films that are retro pieces, like L.A. Confidential, and say, oh, that's period. We didn't want to do the stereotypical stuff.

One thing the futurists never get right, though, is that the extreme desire for polyester only lasted a brief period in the '70s!

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

I think people who live in the worlds that movies are based on end up disliking them. Unless they're from a different time and era.

Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore.