- I'm fascinated by monsters [and] monstrous people and fascinated with illogic and irrationality.
- I grew up in a respectable, lower-middle-class home. Our family was quite educated; my mother was a painter, and stuff like that. And I didn't chop up my next-door neighbour. But I remember those emotions. It was a very strange world. Ireland is very grey, and it seems like nothing has changed for centuries. The only bits of colour were in churches, with statues and gaudy religious vestments. It was a very insanely Catholic country. And, you have an educational system run by celibate men in skirts, which is bizarre in itself. But, there's just a sweet irrationality to the whole place. - about his life growing up in Ireland
- But in a strange way, the more organization and the more preparation you do, the more freedom it gives to the performances and to those things that are totally dependent on those moments when you shoot. Visual things are very complicated. I can't improvise visual events. I can't improvise a sense of composition. I have to compare. I have to look at the street where we are shooting on. I have to know where the light is coming from. Obviously, you would have to know where the trucks are parked and stuff like that. But what you cannot legislate for is emotion, the way emotion displays itself in a scene and that always comes from the actors. That is the way I work.
- The only reason I ever want to make movies is if there are characters that find bits of themselves that they didn't understand. I don't believe we are fully rational beings. I don't believe that any explanation that we ever give for our behavior is adequate.
- There have been too many vampire films lately. The extraordinary thing is it now appeals to young teenage girls. If Anne Rice's vampires symbolized the spread of AIDS, the creature of the night has become something altogether more 'strange.' When I saw the first Twilight (2008) I thought "OK, well now it's become this allegory about chaste love between teenagers. How weird!"
- Hollywood's an animal that has a very particular way of moving. You have to know the way it moves and you only know it by going through it. Over the last few years they've been doing these versions of fairy tales, like Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), and I don't think they did them very well. I think I would have done them better.
- [on Interview with the Vampire (1994)] It seemed to me to be about guilt. It was the most wonderful parable about wallowing in guilt that I'd ever come across. But these things are unconscious: I don't have an agenda. I'm neither a bad Irish Catholic nor a good one.
- Films are essentially attempts to disguise one's intentions, or state of mind. It's amazing, because there have been films I made that felt like they were opportunities to not be personal. But then, years later, it shocks me how revealing it is.
- A film director is a person who rushes to make the decision before anyone else.
- The country I come from - even the dogs bless themselves.
- If you're Irish, you would say there's religion and dying. You wouldn't say that sex has anything to do with it.
- I would have loved to have been a proficient musician. When I was a kid, I used to play classical guitar, and when I was about 24, 25, I used to play various thing - piano, saxophone. And I fell in love with Charlie Parker.
- I think we're absolutely more isolated, you know what I mean? If you're ever on a bus or in a public place, you see all these people around looking into their phones and sending silly little text messages. It does two things: on the one hand, it isolates the person whose eyes are on their phone and not on the person next to them. On the other hand, it makes people who don't do that feel, "Oh my god. Why am I not in touch with all these people?"
- [on The Company of Wolves (1984)] It's a film about storytelling ... It's about the use of stories, and in the case of fairy tales, the main use is to teach young girls not to have sex with men, isn't it?
- The Company of Wolves is about how society teaches young women to look at themselves, and what to be afraid of. It's about a girl learning that the world of sensuality and the unknown is not to be feared, that it's worth getting your teeth into.
- [on Michael Collins (1996)] It was a unique opportunity. After I made Angel (1982), David Puttnam asked me to write a script about Michael Collins and Warners read it and they didn't want to make it. It vanished into the vaults. Then after I made Interview with the Vampire (1994) they asked me, 'What do you want to do next?' And I said, 'You have a script I wrote years ago'. So after a lot of thought - and persuasion from David Geffen - they decided to make it. It wouldn't happen now. They gave $25 or $30 million, which was a lot of money 20 years ago. You could mount a big production and do something that they didn't fully understand but that they were willing to entertain. It was a very interesting movie to make at that time - in 1995-1996. The IRA had just declared a ceasefire so there were many parallels between Michael Collins and Gerry Adams. The truth is, Michael Collins was a specifically Irish movie and I felt very lucky to get Warner Brothers to finance it. It wasn't particularly a heroic story, but about a person who put together a killing-machine. Then, when he thought he could take the machine apart, he found that he couldn't.
- I didn't make The End of the Affair (1999) as a religious parable. The story speaks about a woman who leaves a man for reasons even she doesn't understand. You know, the element of the irrational entering these peoples' lives really appealed to me, but this is not a particularly religious instinct. It's not anything about Catholicism. I was brought up a Catholic and was quite religious at one stage in my life, when I was young. But it left me with no scars whatever; it just sort of vanished. I like stories about the collapse of rationality, stories that bring characters to points where reason is no longer adequate, or where they come to grips with something that has no explanation from their past. I don't know if that is Catholic. Then again - it's definitely not Protestant! You know, we do have this need for mysticism. That is in my movies. And I always like to do stories about gods and monsters and imaginary beings of all kinds. God is the greatest imaginary being of all time. Along with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, the invention of God is probably the greatest creation of human thought. And I guess that's what compelled me to do a film of this Graham Greene book - the challenge of portraying a man who's in a triangular relationship that's really a quadrangle, and one quarter will never reveal itself. And there was a kind of gravity to it that I liked. If there is something in it that is universal, it will come out. It's definitely about transcendence - and it's about infinity. It's about the experience of a woman who kneels over her lover's body and steps out of her time. It's like she goes into a whole other geological strata of being, and can no longer face what the rest of her life is like. That I really believe in.
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