- I consider my films first and foremost to be dramas about individuals in personal struggles and I consider myself to be a dramatist before I am a political filmmaker. I'm interested in alternative points of view. I think ultimately the problems of the planet are universal and that nationalism is a very destructive force. I also like anarchy in films. My heroes were Luis Buñuel and Jean-Luc Godard. Breathless (1960) was one of the first pictures I really remember being marked by, because of the speed and energy. They say I'm unsubtle. But we need above all, a theatre that wakes us up: nerves and heart.
- Nationalism and patriotism are the two most evil forces that I know of in this century or in any century and cause more wars and more death and more destruction to the soul and to human life than anything else.
- [on legacies] Alexander's lasted 2,300 years. Why? He's remembered because of his vision, because of his compassion, because of his generosity, because of his spirit, because he was different. He was a general, a man who was able to weep over his [dead] soldiers on the battlefield. Never before had that happened. So this is a special man who has been remembered. There is a reason this film [Alexander (2004)] was made. It is bigger than us, bigger than me, bigger than Colin [Colin Farrell] and all our team.
- [on Alexander (2004)] But I always liked the Greek outfits. They were sexier than the Romans', you've got to admit. And they didn't wear sandals. They wore boots. So don't call it a sword-and-sandal [movie], for Christ's sake! It's sword-and-boot, okay?
- [on Alexander the Great] This was the golden boy of all history. I've been trying to make Alexander (2004) for a long time. In 1991 with Val Kilmer, in 1996 with Tom Cruise. Then Colin Farrell came along, and he was perfect. He was a tough, Tyrone Power, barstool-looking boy from Dublin. We made him a blond, which was perfect for him, and he became Alexander.
- He went for the head. Kill the king, and your enemy folds. Alexander would have gone after Osama bin Laden. I'm sorry, but [John Kerry] was right.
- I don't believe in this business of chopping up a film and then releasing a "director's cut" on DVD. What you see should be the director's cut. This is the director's cut. If you can spend four hours killing Bill, Alexander (2004) deserves some space.
- If we had to do things the American PG way, then we were screwed. Alexander (2004) had to be an R picture. If you work in Hollywood, you have to get past the studio development committees. The thousands of demands. The previews where they dumb it down for the audience. The system wears you down. It's a monster - demanding, uncompromising. [Martin Scorsese] and [Spike Lee] have been through hell...
- If I could talk to Alexander, I'd ask him why he married Roxane. But the Greeks did have a regard for women: Six of the 12 gods are women, after all. Marrying her pissed off all of his men, but he didn't care, he was making a point.
- The Cold War has been the most irritating thing to me personally. Throughout my life we've been in the grip of militarism and military budgets and a mindset that dictates a war on Communism, and that's a drain on the national energy. The real enemy is nationalism and patriotism.
- [on JFK (1991)] I thought it was a helluva thriller. JFK's [John F. Kennedy's] murder marked the end of a dream, the end of a concept of idealism that I associate with my youth. Race war, Vietnam, Watergate. If JFK had lived, the combat situation in Vietnam would never have occurred.
- I love intelligent films that come at you fast. I don't have attention deficit disorder, my mind moves fast. There's a lot to deal with in my films. We had so many facts to go through, so the governing style was flash, cut, flash, repeat.
- If I were [George W. Bush], I would shoot myself. I think he lives in fear of drinking again. There's nothing more dangerous for America than an ex-alcoholic President who tells you to believe in Jesus.
- I wasn't prophetic. It was there all around us. Money was the sex of the 1980s.
- Alexander to me is a perfect blend of male-female, masculine-feminine, yin-yang. He could communicate with both sides of his nature.
- The Indians once told me that stones are the most revered and ancient of recording devices. And that perhaps I am here on this Earth to write of these mute histories - just another stone, an 'Oliver' stone.
- [on the September 11 terrorist attack on New York City] This attack was pure chaos, and chaos is energy. All great changes have come from people or events that were initially misunderstood, and seemed frightening, like madmen.
- I believed in the John Wayne image of America. My father was a Republican, and he taught me that it was a good war because the Communists were the bad guys and we had to fight them. And then there was the romanticism of the Second World War as it appeared in the films we mentioned. Obviously, the reality was very different.
- They make prostitutes of us all.
- When I go to the movies, and I have to sit through ten previews of films that look [alike] and tell the whole story, you know that we've reached an age of consensus. And consensus is the worst thing for us. We all agree to agree. That's where we lose it as a culture. We have to move away from that.
- [on Platoon (1986)] I wrote the "Platoon" script in 1976 in New York City. Primarily because I'd reached a point in my life that if I didn't write about it, I would forget what had happened in the war.
- The film business? I love film, but the film business is shit.
- Josh [Josh Brolin] is actually better looking than George W. Bush] but has the same drive and charisma that Americans identify with Bush, who has some of that old-time movie-star swagger. I want a fair, true portrait of the man [for my film].
- I should be making movies about the Dulles brothers [John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles], I should be making movies about Dwight D. Eisenhower, I should be making movies about the fifties and the forties. We should be free. I'm hamstrung, I mean, they're always... preordaining, proclaiming... They always make a brouhaha, a controversy, out of nothing. It's like they're trying to keep me away from these areas.
- The reaction to JFK (1991) was just stunning. I've never spent so much time defending a film after its release.
- [on President John F. Kennedy] He was the first man who stood up as a world leader and said, "We are one people, one planet. We must survive together or we will not survive at all." And it's a shame, because he was almost 30 years ahead of his time because 30 years later they're saying that.
- [on his Vietnam War experience] You get to a point where you can smell them [the enemy]... I got to a place where I was using all my senses.
- [on his childhood] It was a harsh upbringing in the sense that my parents divorced quickly. I was in a boarding school, so it was all boys in those days... And there was no femininity in my life either. My mother was often in Europe, I didn't see her very much.
- [on casting Charlton Heston in Any Given Sunday (1999)] I wanted to show him he was still loved for all he gave to the movies. I remember his strength while in substantial pain from arthritis, during long shooting hours. He was a gentleman on the 14th hour, as he was on the first.
- If [George W. Bush] had spent some time in Vietnam, he would have a very different view on war.
- I'm tired of defending the accuracy of my movies. JFK (1991) was a case to be proven, Nixon (1995) was a penetrating biography of a complex and dark man. But I'm not bound by those strictures any more. [George W. Bush] is not a complex and dark man, so it's different. This movie can be funnier because Bush is funny. He's awkward and goofy and makes faces all the time. He's not your average president. So, let's have some fun with it. What are they going to do? Discredit me again?
- The film business has always been full of strange characters. Who the hell gets into this business but gamblers and buccaneers and pirates? You don't get Henry Paulson as a producer in this business, that's for sure.
- I'll welcome any sorts of investors in my films, as long as I can keep my freedom and my content free of interference. If you're asking if I would do a movie with a known drug dealer, no, I wouldn't. You don't want to corrupt a movie, though the nature of the film business lends itself to criminal enterprises.
- [on Stanley Kubrick] The most interesting aspect of a scene is "controlled uncertainty". That's what Kubrick got. Everybody else would shoot pretty conventionally, but when I saw [Jean-Luc Godard] or Kubrick, in that period when I was studying film with more intensity, there was an unpredictability about Stanley Kubrick. Even as a kid, I didn't know what he would do next. It's the way Kubrick looks at reality. His reality is supercharged.
- No man dies in vain. You die because you believe for something. You hope that the cause is worth it. And in Vietnam we have reasons to question it. But you die hopefully with honor and with courage. And you should be remembered for your sacrifice. That is not to say the war was right, but you honor the men who fought in the war.
- I thought we [the United States] were going to go to war in Iran. If we had been more successful in Iraq, I have no doubts that we would have been more involved in the Iranian situation now.
- [on Bernie Madoff] Madoff I consider to a be a sociopath; he was a crook running a Ponzi scheme.
- [on the recession] Wall Street has an important role to play, and it can be a very constructive role in financing, in new business, in financing state bonds and pension plans. But the speculation is the mother of all evils. There have to be regulations. And we're not getting these regulations in place.
- Look, you know something of what I've fought against in the U.S. establishment, but - McDonald's is good for the world, that's my opinion. Because I think war is the most dangerous thing. Nationalism and patriotism are the two most evil forces that I know of in this century or in any century and cause more wars and more death and destruction to the soul and human life than anything else - and can still do it with nuclear war. The prime objective we have in this era is to prevent war, to live in peace. The best way you can do that is to bring prosperity to as many people across the world as you can. And when you spread McDonald's all over the world, food becomes cheaper and more available to more people. Won't it be great when they can have McDonald's throughout Africa?
- The Pax Americana, to me, is the dollar sign. It works. It may not be attractive. It's not pretty to see American businessmen running all around the world in plaid trousers, drinking whiskey. But what they're doing makes sense. Now it's been picked up more intelligently by the Japanese, the British, the Germans. But it brings education, health, and welfare to the rest of the world.
- I don't feel particularly old, but I feel it in the morning when I wake up. Film is exhausting to make, it's a very tiring process physically.
- You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person you may hate. We can't judge people as only "bad" or "good". [Adolf Hitler] is an easy scapegoat throughout history and it's been used cheaply. He's the product of a series of actions. It's cause and effect.
- I agree with my father that the foundation of a healthy, prosperous and relatively free society is capitalism. The whole Alexander Hamilton idea of capitalism was to make the country grow, and he was essentially right that banks could be used to make the country grow, because we need capital and we need credit. And that is fundamental, and somehow people when they attack Wall Street so blindly, so ignorantly, they lose sight of that function.
- J.P. Morgan merits enormous attention. He was a pharaoh. He controlled American business and governments in a way that's never been seen since.
- [on Russia and China] When I was researching dissidents during the 1980s in the Soviet Union, there was a form of denial, which was that these people, who were very courageous people opposing the regime, were going to psychiatric institutes. The Russian people did not understand them and I felt very sorry for these people. I tried to do a movie about it but it could not get it financed. But I remember at that time researching the Brezhnev [former Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev] regime how much of a hero Joseph Stalin was to the average Russian who did not really know about the great purges, and terrors, and famines of that period. Of the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Self-delusion of a population in denial is overwhelming to me still at my age. In China, which I've visited several times, I see a new generation, young people, crippled with amnesia. Unable to gain access to their own history. And then I see a generation my age, older people, men and women, and I'm amazed by what they've been through in their lifetime. Far more than I have, because they have lived a Lewis Carroll life, where it's been a 180-degree turn at the middle of their lives, at the age of 30 or 40 they've moved from collective Communism and worship of one god Mao, to a highly brutal competitive individual consumption and corruption in the name of another god: money.
- [on Alan Parker] Yes, I did say Alan Parker has no sense of humor, and this comment will haunt me for the rest of my days. But he doesn't, does he? Have I missed something?
- [on his script for Scarface (1983)] Al Pacino intimidated me when I watched him in rehearsals, I saw how he turned Tony Montana into something very feral, something immigrant and hungry and decadent.
- [on taxation] I pay 50% at the end of the day, it's a lot of dough. We work very hard, but we try to create things, we produce things. I think production is the key, I think producers should be encouraged. But when you're a speculator and you don't produce anything, that's where I think you should be taxed differently. I think there should be a bank tax. I think there should be a speculation tax, much higher. There's been proposals to that effect and they get defeated by the Republicans in Congress. I would put a tax on speculation because if you roll over stuff and you're just making money with money, like a casino, that's when you should really be taxed. A "Casino Tax", so to speak. But I don't really think taxing productivity is wise beyond a certain point. I'll pay 50%, but when you get to the 60% mark you're really dying, because you give jobs. My dad, who was a stockbroker, used to say, "No profit without production".
- When I did Platoon (1986) in 1986, I was saying very openly that marijuana helped me survive the war. It helped me keep my humanity in a situation that was dehumanizing.
- It's not a war on drugs. It's a war for money. There's too much money in it to back out now. Even if they taxed it, and they'd love to, there's so much money on the criminal investigation side with the DEA and the prison system. There are so many people in jail for drugs. They spend billions annually keeping non-violent criminals in jail, many of them drug users. How do you go back after forty years of tactics that haven't worked?
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