Milos Forman Quotes
"I know this sounds so little, and not serious enough, but I believe that I have to have fun. We all have to have fun - me, the actors, the cameraman, everybody should feel as if we are making a home movie, because that is the only way to open the film to a certain kind of lightness. If everybody involved feels the seriousness, the heavy weight of money being stamped on movies, it somehow influences the result in a way which is anesthizing to life."
"Director is little bit of everything, little bit of the writer, little bit of an actor, little bit of an editor, little bit of a costume designer. Good director is the director who chooses for this profession people who are better than he is. Yes, I can write, but I have to have a writer who is a better writer than I am, I have to have actors who are better actors than I am, I have to have sound engineers who are better sound engineer than I am, you know. It`s a strange profession, ....visually it`s your vision."
"Give me $100,000 and I will make the film for $100,000. Give me $10m and I will make the film for $10m. Give me $100m and I will spend it."
Who doesn`t have sympathy for the underdog? Of course, I do. We create institutions, governments and schools to help us live, but every institution has a tendency, after a while, to behave not as if they should be serving you, but that you should be serving them. That`s when the individual gets in conflict, because we are paying these institutions with our taxes, we are paying them to serve us and help us live, and not to tell us how to live and dominate us. I wouldn`t say it`s the underdog but it`s always the conflict within the individual and the institutions. Instead of underdogs, let`s talk about dogs. If you corner a dog, he`s ready to bite you. That`s the reality. Otherwise he`s a loveable, wonderful creature. If you corner him, he can behave abominably. And so does a human being. When an individual is cornered by society or an institution, well, he can behave abominably and I can`t really hide it or glorify it. Neither. It`s just a fact of life.
The theatre is different from the movies, which is very right for the theatre, because you know when the curtain goes up, that nothing is real, that everything is stylized. The tree is not a real tree, it`s stylized. The language is stylized and must be stylized because you don`t have editing. You have to write lines so that you can communicate to the audience everything so they will understand. It`s stylized for that purpose. But film is very different because you see that everything is real. The trees are real, the buildings are real, the sky is real, so people better be real too and not stylized like on the stage.
On his twin sons: "Originally we were going to name the baby Andy, because I was doing a film about Andy Kaufman. Then we learned we were having twins, and we said, OK, it will be Andy and Tony, after Andy`s famous character, Tony Clifton. But then my son`s wife gave birth to a daughter, and they named her Toni. I couldn`t have a Tony, so we chose Jim. When you choose names for your children, you want to name them after somebody you like very much, so the name will always ring beautifully in your ears. And that was how I felt about Jim Carrey."
On Valmont (1989): "We were in the middle of our script already when they announced their version, based on the play. Of course we immediately learned they were rushing into it very fast. With the concept I had, we all knew I couldn`t be faster. We couldn`t beat them. So, I was expecting a call from the producers saying `Sorry, Milos, we can`t take the risk.` The call came. They asked me, `Does it really bother you that another film is going to be made?` I said of course not. And I felt like, god, Hollywood is still crazy. That`s good."
Some scenes have to be done exactly as they are written in the scripts because otherwise the pace would suffer, like that. But then there are scenes which allow a space for improvisation and then I like to encourage improvisation, but you have to always have exact script because 90% of improvisation is usually very boring, unusable. But the 10% or even less, even if you have 1%, you can get such a gem of unrepeatable moments of films that it`s worth it to try to improvise. But if improvisation doesn`t work you have to have a solid script to go back to.
It`s funny to realize, but in my relatively short life I have lived through six or seven different social and cultural systems. First the Democratic Republic of Czechoslovakia, then the limited democracy before World War II, then the Nazi regime. After the Nazi regime there was a kind of democracy again for three years, then came the Stalinist regime, then the reformed Communist regime, and now I am living in a free country.
