Top 210 Quotes & Sayings by Martin Scorsese
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American director Martin Scorsese.
Last updated on November 22, 2024.
More personal films, you could make them, but your budgets would be cut down.
Young film makers should learn how to deal with the money and learn how to deal with the power structure. Because it is like a battle.
I think all of us, under certain circumstances, could be capable of some very despicable acts. And that's why, over the years, in my movies I've had characters who didn't care what people thought about them. We try to be as true to them as possible and maybe see part of ourselves in there that we may not like.
One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.
I happen to like vampires more than zombies.
Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.
Any film, or to me any creative endeavour, no matter who you're working with, is, in many cases, a wonderful experience.
It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily.
I always say that I've been in a bad mood for maybe 35 years now. I try to lighten it up, but that's what comes out when you get me on camera.
I can't really envision a time when I'm not shooting something.
I'm very phobic about flying, but I'm also drawn to it.
If it's a modern-day story dealing with certain ethnic groups, I think I could open up certain scenes for improvisation, while staying within the structure of the script.
I think there's only one or two films where I've had all the financial support I needed. All the rest, I wish I'd had the money to shoot another ten days.
I'd like to do a number of films. Westerns. Genre pieces. Maybe another film about Italian Americans where they're not gangsters, just to prove that not all Italians are gangsters.
I also saw the Dalai Lama a few times.
I was saying as a joke the other day that I love film editing, I know how to cut a picture, I think I know how to shoot it, but I don't know how to light it. And I realize it's because I didn't grow up with light. I grew up in tenements.
I love the look of planes and the idea of how a plane flies. The more I learn about it the better I feel; while I still may not like it, I have a sense of what is really happening.
I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.
Some of my films are known for the depiction of violence. I don't have anything to prove with that any more.
Food tells you everything about the way people live and who they are.
I mean, music totally comes from your soul.
I make different films now.
I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.
You never know how much time you have left.
I do know that some Buddhists are able to attain peace of mind.
If your mother cooks Italian food, why should you go to a restaurant?
What the Dalai Lama had to resolve was whether to stay in Tibet or leave. He wanted to stay, but staying would have meant the total destruction of Tibet, because he would have died and that would have ripped the heart out of his people.
I don't agree with everything he did in his life, but we're dealing with this Howard Hughes, at this point. And also ultimately the flaw in Howard Hughes, the curse so to speak.
I always wanted to make a film that had this sort of Chinese-box effect, in which you keep opening it up and opening it up, and finally at the end you're at the beginning.
I think when you're young and have that first burst of energy and make five or six pictures in a row that tell the stories of all the things in life you want to say... well, maybe those are the films that should have won me the Oscar.
There must be people who remember World War II and the Holocaust who can help us get out of this rut.
There are two kinds of power you have to fight. The first is the money, and that's just our system. The other is the people close around you, knowing when to accept their criticism, knowing when to say no.
I know there were many good policemen who died doing their duty. Some of the cops were even friends of ours. But a cop can go both ways.
On every film you suffer, but on some you really suffer.
The fact that food plays such an important part in my films has everything to do with my family.
All my life, I never really felt comfortable anywhere in New York, except maybe in an apartment somewhere.
It did remind me of something out of Greek mythology - the richest king who gets everything he wants, but ultimately his family has a curse on it from the Gods.
I'm going to be 60, and I'm almost used to myself.
Every year or so, I try to do something; it keeps me refreshed as to what's going on in front of the lens, and I understand what the actor is going through.
I was born in 1942, so I was mainly aware of Howard Hughes' name on RKO Radio Pictures.
I don't really see many people... don't really go anywhere either.
As you grow older, you change.
My father had this mythological sense of the old New York, and he used to tell me stories about these old gangs, particularly the Forty Thieves in the Fourth Ward.
My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else.
There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.
The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.
If I'm not complaining, I'm not having a good time, hah hah!
I grew up within Italian-American neighborhoods, everybody was coming into the house all the time, kids running around, that sort of stuff, so when I finally got into my own area, so to speak, to make films, I still carried on.
Eradicating a religion of kindness is, I think, a terrible thing for the Chinese to attempt.
When I was growing up, I don't remember being told that America was created so that everyone could get rich. I remember being told it was about opportunity and the pursuit of happiness. Not happiness itself, but the pursuit.
And as I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things.
I think what happened there was just the budget would be too big to build these sets because nothing really exists here in New York of that period; you have to build it all.
Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.
Hong Kong cinema is something you can't duplicate anyway.
I just wanted to be an ordinary parish priest.
Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.
When I'm making a film, I'm the audience.
The term 'giant' is used too often to describe artists. But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.
I'm an older generation.
Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god... I loved his idea of what filmmaking was.
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