A Quote by Howard Keel

It was a fine cast and lots of fun to make, but they did the damn thing on the cheap. The backdrops had holes in them, and it was shot on the worst film stock. — © Howard Keel
It was a fine cast and lots of fun to make, but they did the damn thing on the cheap. The backdrops had holes in them, and it was shot on the worst film stock.
Paintings are seldom guilty and often framed for crimes they did not commit. Some cover holes-holes in walls, holes in lives. Some make holes-in wallets, holes in hearts...in negative space.
I shot film with the Coen brothers on 'Hail, Caesar!' That's fine. I'm sentimental about film; I've shot film for forty years or something.
Even before 'Moon,' I did a short film called 'Whistle,' and it had a lot of the things that I thought I would need to be able to do on a feature film: I shot on location, there was special FX work, there was stunt work, we used squibs, I shot on 35 mm film.
I did this film for less money than it costs to stay in this hotel. We shot it in 20 days. We couldn't screw up takes for fun because we didn't have enough film.
I never intended to have a career as a journalist, writing about people who make movies. I did it as something that was really rewarding to do, given the opportunity to express myself about something I cared about, and also to learn a lot by watching filmmakers I admired. In a sense, it was my film school. After doing it for a few years, I decided that the time had come to get it together and do some work of my own. Even for a cheap movie, you need film stock and equipment and actors. Whereas to write, all you need is paper and an idea, so I felt that writing might be my stepping stone.
Politics, poverty, riches, etc - these are but backdrops for the grand cinema, the opera: the glory of your life. Sure, change the backdrops, make them better, but it is this inside-ness that matters most. Nothing else, at the last breath, matters, but your very own poetry. The glory of living.
Don't let the vision be shot through with holes, but be damn sure some of your best and brightest are shooting at it -- with bazookas as well as sniper's rifles.
I have said a lot of 'yeses' to lots of first-time film-makers. Lots, lots, lots. I admire them a lot, I respect them a lot. It is of greatest pride to be working with someone's first film - like being given a Nobel Prize or an Oscar.
When you're doing a film and the majority of the film is cast black, for me, it's most important to get people to view those movies as just movies, as just good movies. At the end of the day, regardless of the color of the cast, we're all doing the same thing in this business: trying to make a good film.
Not to bash Los Angeles, but there is always a feeling in LA of where your stock is. Are you the top of the heap at the moment or do you have the blockbuster, did you get cast in that thing?
I never played a perfect 18 holes. There is no such thing. I expect to make at least seven mistakes a round. Therefore, when I make a bad shot, I don't worry about it. It is just one of the seven.
It's an eclectic film and I think we served the novel really well. And we had a great cast who worked for free. Everyone read it and said, I'm in, from Nick [Nolte] to Albert [Finney] to Omar [Epps] to Barbara [Hershey]. We really had fun and shot it in a very short time. I think the subject matter is more topical today, more to the point, than it was 30 years ago, when it concerned the Vietnam War.
If you make the wrong decision, you make the wrong decision. That's all there is to it. There are few guarantees in life. One of them is that you will make lots of mistakes The worst thing you can do is wimp out and spend your life in suspended animation refusing to make a choice because it may not be a perfect one.
I did a film that I shot in 24 hours that was self-financed for $5,000. It was a feature called Looking For Jimmy that I shot with a bunch of friends. I spent eight months editing because we had 24 hours of footage that made no sense and I learned a lot about directing while editing that film.
When we finally had a cast and could see what they could do, here was an opportunity to go back and modify things. We didn't actually do that much modifying, but we did enough to make it feel as if they fit in their own skin, and we got a lot of good input from them. They're a terrific cast. They worked really hard.
I've had the pleasure of working in the U.K. a few times before. I've shot a few movies there before. One of them was Neil Simon's 'London Suite,' which was based on his play. I also shot a film in Dublin, a little film with Bernadette Peters, called 'Bobbie's Girl.'
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