Robert Towne Quotations

Of course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.

Now they're attracted to one another, but repelled by their ethnic origins, so that there was something to overcome. They had to overcome their own prejudices, which had been imposed by the culture - their own shame at being Mexican and Italian.

One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

To the extent of wanting me there and wanting to know everything about the scene, I think he realized it was important.

I started doing it and I couldn't stop. It really tired the patience of the people around me.

Roman is hands-down the best director I've ever worked with, ... But all of the 1970s was a great era because the studios really left you alone. What has come to be called 'independent film,' you could really do within the studio system at that time.

Colin, Salma, me - none of us took salaries in order to make this movie, in order to get it on film. So it was a movie made on spec.

You're torn between wanting to fill in all the spaces and knowing that's really going to screw up the screenplay. And yet, how are you going to communicate it to people who really don't understand the process?

There was no scene between father and son, and there was a deep-seated need for the two protagonists in the story to face each other with the consequences of what had happened. Now he was able to express to his son that his whole life had been a struggle to prevent this very thing from happening.

There must have been something inevitable about it because we got it done. I lived with (the book) for 20 years when I didn't write (the adaptation), and when I did write it, I lived with it for the next 10, 12 years.

It made me alive to the fact that the most important thing sometimes is what isn't said - to prepare for moments of revelation that can be read entirely on actors' faces without dialogue.

I'm excited and encouraged to see people getting involved with their public lands and forests. We really need the public's help to repair these heavily used recreation sites.

Initially I was weary of it. When something is first done you're looking at all the things you wanted there that are not there.

But in the end we were guided by my memory of the place.

And as far as that goes, when he first started with it he was considering Bob Dylan for Clyde before he did it himself.

People who can't think of anything else but whether the person you love is indented or convex should be doomed not to think of anything else but that, and so miss the other ninety-five percent of life.

Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.

And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made.

But, uh, censorship at that time said that you just absolutely couldn't do anything involving children and so we had to go from there. I don't remember what I changed it to. Duvall is just excellent in it.

But time has caught up with it and I think vindicated it. Shampoo, too: very dark, very ambitious movie.

Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water.

Larry Grobel senses there are no answers in life, only questions. Good ones.

How much are you worth? I have no idea. How much do you want? Naw.I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million? Oh, my, yes. Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford? The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!

You're dumber than you think I think you are.

I'm not in business to be loved, but I am in business.

It was not possible to film in California, because all the areas are heavily built up now. Coming to Cape Town is an invitation to step into the past and recreate Los Angeles of the 1930s.

I'm not supposed to be the one that's caught with his pants down.

If you can find meaning in the type of running you need todo to stay on this team, chances are you can find meaning in another absurd pastime: Life.

Finally, Colin Farrell showed up on my doorstep, only he wasn't Colin Farrell - he was just this Irish kid who had read the script and wanted to do it.

In dramatic writing, the very essence is character change. The character at the end is not the same as he was at the beginning. He's changed-psychologically, maybe even physically.

The straight roads are the roads of progress, the crooked roads are thee roads of genius.

If you have a good ear for dialogue, you just can't help thinking about the way people talk. You're drawn to it. And the obsessive interest in it forces you to develop it. You almost can't help yourself.

What makes screenplays difficult are the things that require the most discipline and care and are just not seen by most people. I'm talking about movement - screenwriting is related to math and music, and if you zig here, you know you have to zag there. It's like the descriptions for a piece of music - you go fast or slow or with feeling. It's the same.

Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying