John Boorman Quotes

#1. 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.

John Boorman

#2. The resistance to [black-and-white] is huge, in the way that you have to sell the film. It's difficult to distribute around the world.

John Boorman

#3. 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.

John Boorman

#4. I was in Japan, and my assistant director had worked with Kurosawa. I used quite of number of Kurosawa's crew.

John Boorman

#5. Black and white is much closer to the condition of
dreaming. It links you to the subconscious and I think that was
part of the great appeal of movies originally.. this strange otherness.

John Boorman

#6. 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.

John Boorman

#7. Black-and-white gives you that sort of parallel world. Also, it's very close to the condition of dreaming, to the unconscious.

John Boorman

#8. 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.

John Boorman

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

John Boorman

#10. 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.

John Boorman

#11. 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.

John Boorman

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

John Boorman

#13. 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.

John Boorman

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

John Boorman

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

John Boorman

#16. I'm trying to suggest a kind of Middle Earth, in Tolkien terms. It's a contiguous world; it's like ours but different.

John Boorman

#17. Up until the middle to late '60s, it was a choice to film in black-and-white or color. But then television became so vital to a film's finance, and television won't show black-and-white. So that killed it off, really.

John Boorman

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

John Boorman

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

John Boorman