Depiction of Violence Quotes

My approach to violence is that if it's pertinent, if that's the kind of movie you're making, then it has a purposeI think there's a natural system in your own head about how much violence the scene warrants. It's not an intellectual process, it's an instinctive process. I like to think it's not violence for the sake of violence and in this particular film, it's actually violence for the annihilation of violence.

A violent scene is art, as much as a sex scene is art. For me, all the scenes were a challenge.

Violence is a form of cinematic entertainment. Asking me about violence is like going up to Vincente Minnelli and asking him to justify his musical sequences.

You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.

One objection I have heard voiced to works of this kind—dealing with Texas—is the amount of gore spilled across the pages. It can not be otherwise. In order to write a realistic and true history of any part of the Southwest, one must narrate such things, even at the risk of monotony.

The reason I've gotten into script-writing, which was accidental to begin with, was that I found it was a far more effective medium for violence. Which is something that I'd always written in songs, but the violence always sat strangely within a song. And I was always interested in the way in which you listen to murder ballads and things like that - these weird lines would kind of come out, like, I drug her by the hair or something - that sat weirdly in the song. Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.

I think the violence is important. It all depends on the genre. Rambo was ultra-violent, and I think it worked. You have to give Stallone credit. You have to respect him for taking that shot, and taking the violence all the way. He was the first one to do that in a long time. It fricking worked.

I don't believe that art makes people violent in any way. I don't. But I do believe art can show people how to be violent and that's much more dangerous in a way.

None of us like violence in the real world, but we're fascinated with it onscreen.

I'm not talking so much about sex - after you've seen sex in a picture, what else can happen - but violence is very bad. People think these are things you are allowed to do. I think they should be forbidden.

The idea that all violence in movies is okay simply because it happens is bull. Directors and writers have a responsibility.

Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.

Movies and television don't make you violent; all they do is channel the violence more creatively.

I'm really interested in violence. And I think there's an inevitably cinematic property that violence brings to the moviegoing experience. But one still has to be thoughtful and mature about how you depict it and how you think it through. You have to think about the effects that violence has on audiences, and it's deployed so casually that I think it's losing its meaning. And when things like violence and murder and the dehumanization of other people lose their meaning, then we're really kind of in a place where we have to reexamine and take a hard look at ourselves.

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.