Reels Quotes

I was tired of playing the nice, clean-cut cowboy in "Rawhide" (1959), I wanted something earthier. Something different from the old-fashioned Western. You know: Hero rides in, very stalwart, with white hat, man`s beating a horse, hero jumps off, punches man, schoolmarm walks down the street, sees this situation going on, slight conflict with schoolmarm, but not too much. You know schoolmarm and hero will be together in exactly 10 more reels, if you care to sit around and wait, and you know the man beast horse with eventually get comeuppance from hero this guy bushwhacks him in reel nine. But (Per un pugno di dollari (1964)) was different; it definitely had satiric overtones. The hero was an enigmatic figure, and that worked within the context of this picture. In some films, he would be ludicrous. You can`t have a cartoon in the middle of a Renoir.

(12/18/03, about the scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) in which Sam helps Frodo up Mount Doom) It was an incredible acting experience, being on the side of a volcano with that language. That language is so beautiful: "It`ll be springtime soon, and they`ll be sowing barley on the fields." When Peter (Peter Jackson) came up to tell me to lower my arm, something like that, tears were streaming down his face, and to see him that emotional just forced me into it . . . It (finally seeing the last three reels of the film) was a huge cry. It was all of the tension and stress and pressure of having a wife and children, having a career, the investment of these movies. I was sobbing and heaving, I could barely breathe, and the movie facilitated that. It was just a huge release.

In New York, we used to go outside film studios and get reels of blank film, and we used to draw on them, do flipper books, that sort of thing.

There is no acting in a serial. You simply race through the reels.

The mind reels when you start to consider the people who chose to stay behind, ... We may never find them.