Quotes from John Boorman

You can't get an actor to do something that is beyond his range, so you have to be aware of the range of the actor and, if necessary, alter the part to suit the actor.

Movie-making is the process of turning money into light. All they have at the end of the day is images flickering on a wall.

And you poor creatures--who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business, too?

When actors are being defensive and defending their position, that is when you get less than good acting.

What is passion? Passion is surely the becoming of a person.

All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived.

The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead.

[M]ovie-making is the process of turning money into light. All they have at the end of the day is images flickering on a wall.

There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.

The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth... and kill!

Even in a godless world, rituals are required.

I love green. Green is the color of nature, trees. I'm a tree freak. I spend a lot of my time planting trees, nurturing them, and studying them. It's one of the colors I couldn't live without.

It's so easy to manipulate an audience, but it's nearly always clear that you are being manipulated. I think even people that are not critically attuned are aware of cynical manipulation in film.

There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side, he was kind of a rather stiff, disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.

I only storyboard scenes that require special effects, where it is necessary to communicate through pictures.

I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.

There are always forces at work in a society, which are really forces of censorship - either religious bodies or zealots who are always putting pressure on things, whether it's books or art or film.

What we need is someone to abolish the House Of Lords, get rid of the Royal Family.

There's always been this strand of filmmaking in Britain which is like socialist neo-realism. That's always been there. I've never been part of that, really; I've been much closer to fantasy.