Top 35 Michael Cimino Quotes

I wouldn’t look pretty as a woman.

It was just – I mean, 6,000 people giving you a standing ovation is quite an experience.

Nobody lives without making mistakes.

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

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.

Hollywood has always been crazy. It’s controlled anarchy. But how can you loathe something that has given you so much?

Being infamous is not fun. It becomes a weird occupation in and of itself.

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.

Anybody who says they’re bitter is sick in their soul. They’ve given up.

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

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.

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.

Journalism is not writing.

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

I love to scout locations.

All one has to do is look at old footage of the firebombing of Dresden during World War II and think of the people beneath those bombs. It’s horrific.

On a movie, you often work fourteen-, sixteen-hour days, six days a week, for six months. It is so easy to let up because of fatigue.

It’s very important to follow your instincts because, beyond what you know exists or what you’re told exists in a given area, your intuition plays a big part in finding something special.

‘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 felt the need to unlearn my formal education.

The Indians believe all things have spirit – even the hail that comes from the sky is spirit. If you believe that, which I implicitly do, everything is alive.

I wouldn’t have had the life I’ve had without movies.

What distinguishes Vilmos Zsigmond from other cinematographers is, of course, talent but, more, physical stamina. You just can’t be great without it.

Would you ask Picasso to explain ‘Guernica?’ Would you ask Nabokov to explain ‘Lolita?’ Would you ask Tolstoy about ‘War and Peace?’ No, you wouldn’t dare.

We all want to experience that in our lives – a moment when we’re two feet off the ground – and making movies gives you that opportunity. It comes and it goes so fast that it’s unreal, but it does happen.

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

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

War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.

It’s one of the wonderful things that the Academy does – a talented person comes along like Mira Sorvino, and it elevates them up to stardom.

Making movies is controlled anarchy, chaos.

If you don’t get it right, what’s the point?

‘Deer Hunter’ is a movie; it is not an attempt to write history.

I feel very, very upset that, when it came time for me to get an Academy Award, that I didn’t especially thank Clint Eastwood.

There is always that need to feel that you’re doing your possible best.