Peter Bogdanovich Quotations

But at a certain point, and I don't really know... people have asked me this. I don't know exactly what it was that pushed me towards directing, but I think it was a naive notion that if I directed I would be able to play all the roles. A kind of greed.

One of the things that wrong with pictures today, I think, is that so many of the people making them started out wanting to.

The actors are in control, getting outrageous amounts of money. The reason they're getting this kind of money is because the studios don't know what else to do. They don't have a clue about what to do except to pay an actor a lot of money.

You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.

Because they're not in love and they're not happy. ...Just remember, Peter, people do not like beautiful people.

Welles was an astute and worldly man about everything but his art. He couldn't afford to be otherwise.

You get luck in pictures, and most of the time it's bad luck.

The Telluride Film Festival is different from all other festivals for its un-hyped enthusiasm and casualness, ... The Industry likes that about the event. It's not one big photo op. It has always been more about movies as fun and a cultural medium, than the marketplace.

Cher is one of the most talented women I've ever met. She's got depth and emotion that haven't even been touched.

There's good directors and bad directors. Some of the critics are really conscientious and really try to do what they can popularize the work or to explain the work and so on. And then there's the critics who just wants to make a reputation by attacking. Those are the ones I'm not keen on.

The criterion for judging whether a movie is successful or not is time.

Tremendous beauty and tremendous ugliness puts you on the outside of things.

If filmmakers are ignorant of the past, they laborto re-invent the wheel in every picture. You sit and think, 'Well,we're back to 1903 here.'

I think one of the reasons younger people don't like older films, films made say before the '60s, is that they've never seen them on a big screen, ever. If you don't see a film on a big screen, you haven't really seen it. You've seen a version of it, but you haven't seen it. That's my feeling, but I'm old-fashioned.

There are no “old” movies-only movies you have already seen and ones you haven't.