James Ivory Quotes

I never thought about whether film is inherently more sincere, because certainly I think if Guy Maddin had directed A Series Of Unfortunate Events, there probably could have been more of the stage-y irony that is in the books. But I was just interested to see what people would do with it, and worrying that Brad Silberling wouldn't do what I had in mind.

A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation.

We have gotten some terrible reviews at times but if we depended on the judgment of the studios or critics, we never would have made more than one movie.

I avoided nudity unless a film couldn't be told without those scenes. If you look at my films, few of them have that element, yet nudity and male fantasies have become emblematic of my work.

I'd love to see us get to a point where you can make a movie and not worry about the limits of the violence. Then I think they'd get so violent that people would get bored of it.

I am not like Hitchcock, directing the reaction of the public or the audience. I don't like that. I think this is some kind of fascism - 'You need to react like that.' No. No. It's not like this; everyone needs to react as he can.

It's a hard line to walk, man. Cause you know you want to make this movie, you want to make it dark and real, you want to show all this stuff but unfortunately you can't always do that.

A lot of violence, a lot of gore in it, and I just didn't want to do that kind of thing.

The one thing that frustrates me more than anything else is that no studio has ever told me to tone down violence. They only ask you to make it more presentable.

I'm very much interested in music specifically and wanted to make a film about it, but not in an atmosphere of censorship.

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.

Communists love to make films about composers because composers compose music and don't talk subversive things.

I think comics can be the basis for great films, but I think the focus of such a project should be on making the film as good as possible, not on painstakingly replicating the comic.

It's true that the human body is more vulnerable than the products of the human mind. We need to protect artists and journalists people to allow them to work.

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children.

There are always forces at work in a society, certainly in America, which are really forces of censorship -either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film. And all art is fundamentally subversive, because it upsets people's perceptions, their notions about society. Therefore, art is dangerous, but good art is always making us reassess our thoughts and feelings about how we relate to other people. There are always people who fear that and want to suppress that.

If it doesn't have sex scenes in it, I won't do it.

When people censor themselves they're just as likely to get rid of the good bits as the bad bits.

Each movie is different because each audience is different. You're not dictated by what they tell you to do. You're more dictated by seeing symptoms of things you didn't intend, and how you can fix those symptoms.

I was lucky enough to know Maurice Sendak, and talked to him about doing the movie. For a while, I was really apprehensive of it, because Where The Wild Things Are is a book I love so much, and I didn't want to add something to it just to be able to make a movie, or put my stamp on it, or something like that.

Yeah, when you're making a film, the book is a good tool, but once you have the script and you're making a movie, you have to let go of the book.

A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

Those of us who make films try to make something that we're feeling and that we would like. Then we just hope an audience responds the same way. It's very important to have the electrical circuit made, but I don't have control over how people feel when they flip the switch. So the whole idea of marketing research and test screenings is just foreign to me.

You do the work and you want people to see it; but, um while I'm doing the work, the result doesn't matter at all to me. Ultimately, I don't, I don't care whether the film is - you know - some big giant box-office bonanza and I don't care if its a complete flop. To me, when a film gets made and it's actually finished it's a success. They're all a success in their own way.