John Boorman Quotes

It’s so easy to manipulate an audience, but it’s nearly always clear that you are being manipulated. I think even people that are not critically attuned are aware of cynical manipulation in film.

There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.

Black and white is much closer to the condition of
dreaming. It links you to the subconscious and I think that was
part of the great appeal of movies originally.. this strange otherness.

And you poor creatures–who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business, too?

Movie-making is the process of turning money into light. All they have at the end of the day is images flickering on a wall.

Up until the middle to late ’60s, it was a choice to film in black-and-white or color. But then television became so vital to a film’s finance, and television won’t show black-and-white. So that killed it off, really.

Black-and-white gives you that sort of parallel world. Also, it’s very close to the condition of dreaming, to the unconscious.

I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.

The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead.

I only storyboard scenes that require special effects, where it is necessary to communicate through pictures.

All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived.

You can’t get an actor to do something that is beyond his range, so you have to be aware of the range of the actor and, if necessary, alter the part to suit the actor.

What is passion? Passion is surely the becoming of a person.

There’s always been this strand of filmmaking in Britain which is like socialist neo-realism. That’s always been there. I’ve never been part of that, really; I’ve been much closer to fantasy.

When actors are being defensive and defending their position, that is when you get less than good acting.

I think most films are too predictable. They follow familiar patterns. I suppose audiences like to know where they stand but I like films that take me by surprise, take unexpected turns and twists.

I’m trying to suggest a kind of Middle Earth, in Tolkien terms. It’s a contiguous world; it’s like ours but different.

All art is fundamentally subversive, because it upsets people’s perceptions, their notions about society. Therefore, art is dangerous, but good art is always making us reassess our thoughts and feelings about how we relate to other people. There are always people who fear that and want to suppress that.

The resistance to black-and-white is huge, in the way that you have to sell the film. It’s difficult to distribute around the world.