Robert Towne

The [American] dream was more "If you can be similar in that way, you can be American and have equal opportunities." Whereas today it's, how can I put it? It's kind of Balkanized: Black pride. Gay pride. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant pride. All of these things, you know, they're more polarized, aren't they? The red and blue states. Christians, that's the most insidious aspect of it, giving into this great Christian image of America. That's the most frightening thing of all. Whereas [in the past] they're trying to find things that unite us, to minimize the differences. Whereas today there's this belief in empowerment and entitlement by maximizing differences. I'm not so sure that that's healthy. I don't mean that it's not healthy to want to hang onto your culture. But I think it's unhealthy to set it up against somebody else's and say "ours is better." Then there's the Christian Right saying that this is a Christian country when it's not. Show less «

What was once said of the British aristocracy, that they did nothing and did it very well - is a definition that could be applied to movie actors. For gifted movie actors affect us most, I believe, not by talking, fighting, fucking, killing, cursing, or cross-dressing. They do it by being photographed. The point is that a fine actor onscreen conveys a staggering amount of information before he ever opens his mouth. Show less «

Until the screenwriter does his job, nobody else has a job. In other words, he is the asshole who keeps everyone else from going to work. Show less «

"There are the big tent-pole movies and the struggling independents. All these movies that we've spoken about, like Chinatown (1974) and The Last Detail (1973), would probably be independent movies today, and would not be financed in the normal course of things. And that's unhealthy. The amount of ancillary effort unrelated to what goes up on-screen by filmmakers, all of us, having to beg, borrow, and steal to finance, to go out there with hat in hand, the struggle we have to do in preparation just for the movies to happen, is a drain. It's like I was saying to George Clooney at a film festival recently, it's a drain on you, it's time-consuming, it's energy-consuming. You get to the point where you're so fucking tired you feel like you've already done the movie, just trying to get enough money to make it. In the old days, the amount of time it took to make Ask the Dust (2006), I could have made three movies and not been so tired and thought, "God, I never want to do this again"." [on today's Hollywood (March 2006)]. Show less «

Because the one thing you know when you're shooting a script, and I've been on a lot of sets, is space is in a script, and the distance between the page and the stage is so enormous that it is unbelievable how even the brightest people can misread your intent or not see it altogether. Scripts have air in them. Scripts are supposed to leave things up to interpretation, but people can misread things enormously, so sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to put on the screen what you had in mind. Show less «

"Money problems are what led me to projects like Days of Thunder (1990). I needed to pay my bills".