I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
ORSON WELLESNobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
More Orson Welles Quotes
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I’ve spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I’m not irresponsible.
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I’ve never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies. Egotism and laziness. And they’re all lit like television shows.
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I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.
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A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
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Human nature is eternal; therefore one who follows his nature keeps his original nature, in the end.
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Now I’m an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.
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I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.
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A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.
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See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m profoundly convinced that that’s a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.
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Paris is the playwright’s delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor’s city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.
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I’m never certain of a performance – my own or the other actors’ – or the script or anything. But to me it seems there’s only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.
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I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.
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The Godfather’ was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
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I look back on my life and it’s 95% running around trying to raise money to make movies and 5% actually making them. It’s no way to live.
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The director is simply the audience. His job is to preside over accidents.
ORSON WELLES