Todd Solondz Quotes

Storytelling is the only studio movie where the censorship is perfectly clear, the only studio movie with a big red box covering up a shot. I take pride in that - and, of course, in having avoided the fate of Eyes Wide Shut.

In many countries in the Middle East - and this is changing in the wake of the Arab Spring - but for a long time, censorship of books and film was a very big deal. There were books you couldn't buy; things with political content would be censored, but there were some genres of books and film that the censors just didn't understand.

For years, Blockbuster Video has edited movies. Like The Bad Lieutenant, when he's masturbating while the girls in the car are doing the thing. I rented it from Blockbuster and sped to that scene, and it was gone. I called up Blockbuster, and I'm like, "I got an erection, and the scene's not there."

The ultimate censorship is the flick of the dial.

Censorship is a strange situation. There was times when people would burn books because they didn't like what people were doing.

The censorship is such on television in the U.S. that films like mine don't stand a chance.

I worry about censorship in many parts of the world.

But, uh, censorship at that time said that you just absolutely couldn't do anything involving children and so we had to go from there. I don't remember what I changed it to. Duvall is just excellent in it.

I've been involved with violent movies, and then I've also said at a certain point, 'I can't take it anymore. Please cut it.' You know, you've got to respect the filmmaker, and it's a really tough issue.

The fact that there aren't more restrictions on the media is disgraceful.

In a feature film, the question of censorship always comes up.

Censorship should never go. But we can always give a little more space to the director.

I have not understood till date why we censor adult films. If someone over 18 can get married, produce children and drive cars, why can't they watch a movie?

The ratings thing is the real issue. It really hurts movies. For example, in Redbelt, I smoked. The whole plot of my character was based on the fact that I was a smoker. And then they discovered that just by having someone smoking in the movie, it immediately makes the rating an R. So they had to cut out every shot where I had a cigarette in my hand and it totally affected the performance. That was very frustrating to David Mamet as well. I can remember him saying, "It's a nightmare."

There [in Allied] were things that were written that were cut, and things that were shot that were cut, but if the film works, they are erased from memory.

You have to remember the police used to raid and arrest the audience for seeing Scorpio Rising (1964), or Jack Smith movies. Wouldn't that be exciting today, if you see went to the movie and everyone at the IFC was arrested in a paddy wagon and taken away?

There are people on the ratings board and so froth who don't want certain scenes in the film. There are people who come up and say, "What graphic love scenes. I think, How can a love scene be graphic? Have you seen Total Recall? In this R-rated movie you see a man who you've seen being in love with and sleeping with this fabulous woman shoot her right through the head. "Consider this a divorce" is supposed to be the funniest line in the movie.

It's funny that you can murder someone horribly and graphically and disturbingly in a horror film, and it's not an NC-17, but if you put a naked man on screen, everyone freaks out.

All the copycat movies were always PG-13 and people said: "Nobody wants violence."

Americans are attracted to the dark side. But which movies should be allowed to be violent and show that dark side, and which should not? I don't believe in censorship, but I do think there are horrible movies that are bad for you.

We live in a world where in the movie you can disembowel someone in a youth hostel in Romania, but you can't show people having sex. I think it's weird.

If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it for the reptile from whom it has been fabricated.

["Where the Buffalo Roam" is] horrible pile of crap. [Bill] Murray did a good job. But it was a bad script. You can't beat a bad script. It was just a horrible movie. A cartoon. But Bill Murray did a good job. We actually wrote and shot several different endings and beginnings and they all got cut out in the end. It was disappointing.

[David Milch] had say, "You have to understand that our history of western movies, what we've been doing in westerns since the movies began to talk, you had audiences that would be offended by certain things, and there was a cleaning-up of the way people spoke."

I don't mind ratings boards. As a viewer, you have the right not to see a film.