Serpent Quotes

"Lies about your physical appearance in Hollywood creep in like a nasty serpent in your bed. It`s awful. "Who`s got the best outfit?", "Who`s makeup artist is terrible?", etc... I`ve really been learning that I have to choose to believe that it is not my clothes or my hair or my makeup that is going to make me shine. It`s a battle I fight everyday with myself."

To me, The Wild Bunch (1969) was distasteful. It would have been a good picture without the gore. Pictures go too far when they use that kind of realism, when they have shots of blood spurting out and teeth flying, and when they throw liver out to make it look like people`s insides. "The Wild Bunch" was one of the first to go that far in realism, and the curious went to see it. That may make the bankers and stock promoters think that it is a necessary ingredient for successful motion pictures. They seem to forget the one basic principle of our business - illusion. We`re in the business of magic. I don`t think it hurts a child to see anything that has the illusion of violence in it. All our fairy tales have some kind of violence - the good knight riding to kill the dragon, etc. Why do we have to show the knight spreading the serpent`s guts all over the candy mountain?

(On Andrei Tarkovsky): When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn`t explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure- The Serpent`s Egg (1977), Beröringen (1971), Ansikte mot ansikte (1976) and so on.

Ingmar Bergman said he cast David Carradine in The Serpent`s Egg (1977) "because he has the princely blood of his father in his veins."

Horror is the future. And you cannot be afraid. You must push everything to the absolute limit or else life will be boring. People will be boring. Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can`t be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.

There is poison in the fang of the serpent, in the mouth of the fly and in the sting of a scorpion; but the wicked man is saturated with it.

The serpent, the king, the tiger, the stinging wasp, the small child, the dog owned by other people, and the fool: these seven ought not to be awakened from sleep.

Providence has been so indulgent to us as to allow of but one venomous reptile of the serpent kind in these kingdoms, and that is the viper.

It was first the awful state of the land that was pressed upon me. I saw the blindness and infatuation of the people to be very great. I felt the cry of Liberty just to be the hiss of the serpent, to drown them in perdition. It was just no God.