Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than people really talk, make paltry human enterprises seem important. Singers and musicians show us human beings making sounds far more lovely than human beings really make. Architects give us temples in which something marvelous is obviously going on. Actually, practically nothing is going on.

In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is the god; he must create life.

I don't like film. Film is too clankingly real, too permanent, too industrial for me. ... The worst thing about film, from my point of view, is that it cripples illusions which I have encouraged people to create in their heads. Film doesn't create illusions. It makes them impossible. It's a bullying form of reality, like the model rooms in the furniture department of Bloomingdales.

The length of the film should be directly related to the endurance of human bladder.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I see another movie I want to make.

In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

Even my failures make money and become classics a year after I make them.

A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.

Godzilla was the most masterful of all dinosaur movies because it made you believe it was really happening.

Before I go off and direct a movie I always look at 4 films. They tend to be: Seven Samurai, Lawrence of Arabia, It's a Wonderful Life, and The Searchers.