A Quote by Peter O'Toole

You talk about auteur de cinema having things in their heads and putting them all across, can you imagine Shakespeare writing screenplays? — © Peter O'Toole
You talk about auteur de cinema having things in their heads and putting them all across, can you imagine Shakespeare writing screenplays?
I believe we have two ideas about how movies are made in our heads. Idealizations. Platonic ideals. One of them is of a movie that is completely uncontrolled, and another is a movie that is completely controlled. The auteur theory vs. cinéma vérité.
All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.
Cinema d'auteur, cinema about people, about emotions. About la difficulté d'être, the difficulty of being, existential problems. That's what the nouvelle vague is. The early '60s was all about that.
When I'm writing, it's about the page. It's not about the movie. It's not about cinema. It's about the literature of me putting my pen to paper and writing a good page and making it work completely as a document unto itself. That's my first artistic contribution. If I do my job right, by the end of the script, I should be having the thought, 'You know, if I were to just publish this now and not make it . . . I'm done.
In the theater you can chain a blue-assed baboon in the stalls and with a good script, good actors, and a good set you'd have what is called a production. With the cinema someone has to know about lenses and fine things. I have no time for the "auteur de cinema." To me, it's meaningless.
Film is pop art. It's not whether it's auteur cinema or not; that's a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.
In my screenplays - from the very beginning I've always used tape. I talk my screenplays. And then have somebody transcribe them.
For me, if Shakespeare was around today, he'd be writing screenplays - a big Hollywood movie.
I talk to my readers on social networking sites, but I never tell them what the book is about. Writing is lonely, so from time to time I talk to them on the Internet. It's like chatting at a bar without leaving your office. I talk with them about a lot of things other than my books.
People know that I have a great love for cinema. Not just for commercial cinema, but for the “cinema d’auteur.” But to me, two of the great “auteurs” are actually actors and they both happen to be French. One is Alain Delon and the other is Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Delving deeper into character's motivations one thing I always find helpful is to imagine the person as a child, imagine them at a very early stage, prior to having all of the things taken away from them, or all of the habits put onto them that they end up having, and then going from there.
Writing screenplays is incredibly hard. I can't call it joy. Writing Novels? Joy. Directing? Joy. Writing Screenplays? That's where you pay all your dues.
The way Shakespeare wrote Fallstaff is with a heightened language and everything. That's the genuis of having Ken Branagh here as well. Shakespeare doesn't require you to have a doctorate in his language or whatever to understand him. It just has to be directed and played right. It's all about scale and presence and getting these huge, epic stories across.
When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written.
Music is so hard to talk about in many ways, It communicates beyond what our language can put across, and having to sit there and analyze it and talk about it is a struggle for me.
I love Hap and Leonard and plan to write more about them, but not exclusively about them. I have always worked in film, or since the eighties, but my screenplays - though I got paid and did screenplays for Ridley Scott and John Irvin and Mark Romanek - seldom got made.
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