Quotes from Peter Bogdanovich

One of the things that wrong with pictures today, I think, is that so many of the people making them started out wanting to.

Comedy has to be built carefully.

I've stopped caring what people think.

The end of the studio system signalled the end of the great screen stars. They were the sort of actors who brought their own charismatic personas to each role they played. Audiences felt as if they knew them immediately every time they watched one of their movies.

The first time I met Brando was on a street corner. I was 14. He was walking down the street, and I saw him coming, and I thought, 'It's Marlon Brando.' And he was wearing what turned out to be his outfit from 'On the Waterfront,' because he was shooting.

I was offered 'Popeye,' which Robert Altman made. They offered me $2 million to direct that, which was good money. I wasn't interested in it. I don't like that kind of movie.

I had been an abject fan of Martin and Lewis when I was a kid. I just thought they were terribly funny. None of their movies captured the kind of chemistry they really had.

For a while, all the studios had their art-house divisions, but that went by the by pretty quickly. Now, they're really focusing on these huge blockbusters, spending a fortune on cartoon pictures and comic-strip movies and superhero movies, and they aren't making pictures like 'How Green Was My Valley,' which was an Oscar winner in its day.

Comedy is the hardest thing to get right. I remember a joke we did in 'What's Up, Doc?' that didn't get a single laugh. So we moved the shot a foot-and-a-half to one side, and all of a sudden, the laugh was there. It drives you crazy; the balance is so delicate.

The criterion for judging whether a movie is successful or not is time.

Drama is easy. Comedy's hard.

I don't know how you get to be 40 without having a whole bunch of regrets.

But at a certain point, and I don't really know... people have asked me this. I don't know exactly what it was that pushed me towards directing, but I think it was a naive notion that if I directed I would be able to play all the roles. A kind of greed.

My father, who was a good deal older than my mother, had basically grown up with silent films; sound didn't arrive until he was 30 years old. So he took me to see silent pictures at MoMA when I was 5 or 6 years old.

'Mask' wasn't the version that I wanted when it was originally released. It made money, but it would have made a lot more money. My version was a lot less depressing - tragic, but a lot less depressing.

When I was younger, all my friends were older - John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. I loved talking to those people.

'Jaws' was the first A-list picture that was released like an exploitation picture. They made a lot of money with that picture because they could save a lot of money on advertising. Instead of having a full-page ad in 'The New York Times' for one theater, they had it for 100 theaters.

I loved Keaton. In fact, when I made the chase sequence in 'What's Up, Doc,' I said, 'This is a Buster Keaton chase.'

You see so many movies... the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there's no sense of film grammar. There's no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It's just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.

I could hardly believe that she really existed, that she wasn't a dream. There was something miraculous about Dorothy Stratten.

I think 'Paper Moon' is a comedy-drama. 'What's Up, Doc?' was the most severe comedy, but my favorite film of my own is 'They All Laughed,' which is a kind of bittersweet comedy.

Cher is one of the most talented women I've ever met. She's got depth and emotion that haven't even been touched.

During the Hollywood studio system, they looked for people who were unusual. The stars had peculiarities.

I certainly had an arrogant streak. And I certainly was defensive in certain cases. Maybe I'm still arrogant, but I try not to be.