Quotes from Michael Cimino

They've said everything about me that they could: racist, Marxist, rightist, homophobic, sex change - I don't know what else they could come up with.

I love to scout locations.

I never second-guess myself.

When a guy is perceived as macho, female editors aren't going to like it - because they all want to be men.

Every good war film, if you want to use that phrase - I don't think it's a good phrase, but if you want to use that phrase - every good film, a first-rate film about war, is an anti-war movie.

There's nothing good that comes out of war. It's simply hell on earth, and people survive, and people don't.

I have a very simple definition of a good movie: a good movie makes you forget you're watching a movie.

I was a child prodigy. Like Michelangelo, who could draw a perfect circle at age five. I was extremely gifted. I could paint a perfect portrait of someone at age five.

There's nothing but brutality and bravery or cowardice that comes out of war. That's pretty much it.

I am not a preacher; I'm a reacher.

I think 'American Sniper' is anti-war. It demonstrates the agony of the decision-making that goes on.

I don't believe in defeat.

If you can't stop somebody from working and making movies that you hate, what's the next best thing? Destroy them personally.

Even the details of a rifle, which are nothing but mechanical, if they are made carefully, with attention, become beautiful, satisfying.

There's a need to dig up the past and analyze it.

I don't dispute the accounts of My Lai 4, but I think that anyone who is a student of the war, or anyone who was there, would agree that anything you could imagine happening probably happened.

There have been so many false things written about me by people who don't know me.

I've got a room full of scripts. They go to the ceiling. I can't even hardly walk into it anymore. Most are original, and there are some adaptations like 'Man's Fate.'

Who cares about seeing 10,000 helicopter assaults? That's spectacle.

'Leaving Las Vegas' is a relationship; 'Dead Man Walking' is a relationship, and they're very contained movies. They're compressed and not in wide open spaces all over the place.

I've published a couple of short novels in France that I didn't want to publish in English because I loved the characters too much to subject them to American critics who were not exactly favorable toward my work.

I wish I was making movies back in the days when John Ford made movies and you were a director under contract to a studio. John Ford had years when he made three movies in a year.

Friendship and sentiment and the giving of one's words are very important.

Every great movie is about the people, even if it's a great popular success like 'Gone With the Wind.' It's really not about the Civil War. It's about Scarlett and Rhett. That's who you go to see. You're not going to root for the North or pull for the South, or, you know, it's the people you remember.