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Why should I keep doing things that I've done before?

Robert Altman

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Robert Altman
Age: 81 †
Born: 1925
Born: February 20
Died: 2006
Died: November 20
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Librettist
Screenwriter
Theatrical Director
Writer
Kansas City
Missouri
Done
Things
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Words don't tell you what people are thinking. Rarely do we use words to really tell. We use words to sell people or to convince people or to make them admire us. It's all disguise. It's all hidden -- a secret language.
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Maybe there's a chance to get back to grown-up films. Anything that uses humor and dramatic values to deal with human emotions and gets down to what people are to people.
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We make too much of the good and too much of the bad.
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That wasn't an ending. It was just a stopping point.
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I love fishing. You put that line in the water and you don't know what's on the other end. Your imagination is under there.
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I've never had a big hit movie. MASH was probably the biggest. I don't make those kind of films, and I never have. I wish each one of them would just do billions of dollars worth of ticket sales, but they never do and they never will.
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I don't know what Altmanesque means, though I suppose I'm flattered by it.
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There was not a lot of dialogue. The titles were just to keep you up. It's the visual stimulation that hits the audience. That's the reason for film. Otherwise, we might as well turn the light out and call it radio.
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Most of my films I call arena films. I deal with a confined area -- an arena -- and I try to cover every aspect of it.
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I have never made a movie that's attracted a 14-year-old boy.
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If something works for you, you continue to do it. I did a bunch of pictures for 20th Century Fox when Alan Ladd was over there, but I set the budgets so low that they'd approve and I'd deliver the film. They would have no say in it, which is the kind of arrangement I liked.
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The Oscar for the films, it'd be nice. But I don't make those kind of films, and I don't think that will ever happen.
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If you have a child who is seven feet tall, you don't cut off his head or his legs. You buy him a bigger bed and hope he plays basketball.
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What is an ending? There's no such thing. Death is the only ending.
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Happy endings are absolutely ludicrous, they're not true at all. We see the guy carry the girl across the threshold and everybody lives happily ever after -- that's bullshit. Three weeks later he's beating her up and she's suing for divorce and he's got cancer.
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I want to see something that I've never seen before, so how can I tell that actor what that is? I'm not trying to construct a document or situation that is what I want, because what I want is something new to me.
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If George W. Bush is elected president, I'm leaving for France.
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Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.
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Retirement? You're talking about death, right?
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Making a movie is like chipping away at a stone. You take a piece off here, you take a piece off there and when you're finished, you have a sculpture. You know that there's something in there, but you're not sure exactly what it is until you find it.
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