Peter Finch Quotes

I don't think there ever will be a biopic on me! I would much like some of my books to be made into films.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

I think that when you're making a story... that's based on somebody, the filmmaker has his duty to do his research.

The main objective of our cinema is to entertain. If you can pass on a message at the same time, that is fantastic, but if the audience does not feel they are going to be entertained by the film, they are not going to watch it. There are many examples of very responsible and great films that are being made, but nobody goes to watch them.

My effort has been not only to put the Biblical incident in the original setting... but at the same time give the human touch to convey to my public the reverence and elevation these subjects impart to me.

Sometimes you just can't walk away from films you're offered, like the Dylan Thomas thing.

I really think the biopic thing so rarely works, because people's lives don't have a dramatic shape that can be satisfying.

Everyone relates differently to contemporary stuff. They rely on you to do the research for a period film.

'The Piano' ended up on television. Everything ends up there anyway.

A biopic would have required hiring an actor, and I always wanted to just let Bobby be Bobby. My thought was it would make it a more universal story to focus on ordinary people rather than this extraordinary man.

Personally, I prefer contemporary films, but the market calls for more period choices, especially since China opened up a cinema market in Hong Kong. There's a lot of restriction for contemporary films simply because of subject matter.

Every film may not be appropriate for a theatrical release, and the theatrical business is not a very good business for anybody except the distributor.

We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

The biopic also wasn't a form that I necessarily believed in, because you can never really get it right, you know? It's also a form that's very popular - the straight-ahead biopic.

People say, 'If you open a movie online at the same time as in movie theatres, no one is going to go to the movies.' That's just not true. People love to go out and have a shared experience; they always will.

I've read the 'Public Enemies' script and, no, it's not 100 percent historically accurate. But it's by far the closest thing to fact Hollywood has attempted, and for that, I am both excited and quietly relieved.

I'd like to really make the Montgomery Clift biopic happen.

I wouldn't let a biopic be made on me. That's because I don't believe in them. I don't like them.

I watched Sean Penn, you know, bring Harvey Milk to life. I was on the set every day.

The idea of taking classic American stories and reinterpreting them for a time and place is not just commercially viable. These stories also carry a sensual nature of what it meant to be an American, and they deserve to be reinterpreted.

I am interested in biographical stories. Seldom are good biopics like 'Maha Nati' being made.

It's been increasingly hard to make small stories about female friendship, and, definitely, those stories don't have any shot of getting a theatrical release.

I didn't know that '12 Years a Slave' was being filmed at the same time we were making 'The Retrieval.'