Art is the ability to communicate through an intermediary and to convey one's feelings through an isolated object. It's inspiration and incubation. Putting my subjective feelings into an objective form and then on to you for a subjective interpretation.
I'd live in a museum if I could. I used to spend hours and hours in the Museum of Modern Art.
Theater is like boxing - having the audience ringside. It's instant gratification. Or horrification.
No one's life is totally morbid. Even on a subtle scale there's little flashes of enlightenment and of happiness and joy.
Most of the films I myself like don't do very well. Every director, he has a choice, whether to go for subtlety and try to articulate every minute detail, or to go for the broad strokes and hope that the people will fill in between the lines. I tend to go for the broader strokes.
It's great the way the old-time directors used to manipulate the hell out of you. You see someone dying and all of a sudden a ghost would come out and they go walking hand in hand up the stairway.
I think there's something about being a neophyte that's refreshing and hard to duplicate; it brings about real innovation. Innovation usually comes about through blind ignorance.
Often people going into directing want to learn as much as they possibly can about 'technique.' And I say the hell with that.
Lighting can bring out certain contours in the body, in the face, in the eyes, that otherwise flat lighting couldn't.
When I was cognizant of the war, I was very angry at the street-corner liberals who were trying to defame the footsoldier. Because there was a man who had no choice. He was a cog in the wheel, just trying to survive. I was always aware of that.
The men in Vietnam weren't allowed to fight the war with any kind of concern to win by the government. It was like a war of attrition.
If you come into my house, I'm going to fight much more viciously to get you out than if we were on a neutral piece of land.
When crossing someone's borders you have to be prepared to engage in a war that is far more brutal than if it were to take place on neutral territory.
There is an age-old proverb that really does hold true in every area of life - in relations between nations and right down to the most subtle and sophisticated or must unstable and unsophisticated relations between lovers - and it is this: they took 'kindness' for 'weakness.'
I feel that America is like a child that grew up so strong and so fast and so tall that it became self-conscious about its size and started to stoop over so as not to offend anyone.
I do believe that American should deal from strength.
I've always boxed a certain way. But with Rocky, the character himself had to be kind of awkward. So I had to learn to fight that way.
At the very end, the one person who Rambo should kill, he doesn't kill. He lets it live. Because you can't kill that kind of hypocritical bureaucracy. It goes on forever.
I think people of all occupations, whether it's the camera - puller or the man who's doing the catering, they can identify with Rambo's frustrations, with the veteran's frustrations.
Sometimes when I don't want to cry, I cry. And when I want to I can't. It's subconscious. Like sexual performance.
