Mark Rydell Quotes & Sayings

“He was a psychotic. He was a borderline psychotic. He was a terrific, sensational actor, with a magical screen presence, you couldn't keep your eyes off him, but he was paranoid. He was sure everybody was out to get him.”

“There's evidence of a social decline in direct proportion to technology and the industrialization of the motion picture industry.”

“I long for the days when grosses were not even known. There was no weekend competition.”

“It always amazed me that he was able to do it, and that Orson Welles was able to do it. I never understood it because the talents are absolutely opposite - polar opposites.”

“He's very alive in a scene. He's a very good actor to act with. Even though through most of the picture he's blind, there are many places early in the picture I got to be with him before he was blind. Like convincing him in the office to do the picture.”

“It perhaps has a chance, a commercial chance, this film. It's funny, it's charming, the idea is original, it's unusual and it makes fun of the movie industry in a way that it needs to be poked fun at.”

“It's the unusual leading man. Most of the Hollywood leading men are powerful and capable and strong, heroes. He has this vulnerability, he's fragile, he struggles to find a way to live from day to day that we can identify with, that we can understand.”

“It's very difficult to break into motion pictures, but it's oddly easier for directors today because of independent films and cable, who have inherited for the most part those films of substance that the studios are reluctant to finance.”

“Now a movie goes out to two, three thousand theaters and by Friday night at 10 o'clock they know if you are in or out. That desperate competition is, I think, horrendous. It's awful.”

“Well you know, Woody doesn't rehearse, as opposed to my own method of directing where I really work with actors around a round table for weeks, examining the values of the material, so his technique is very different.”