There's a difference between a Nazi and a German.

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is.

A film is like a battleground. It's love, hate, action, violence, death—In one word, emotions.

Movement should be a counter, whether in action scenes or dialogue or whatever. It counters where your eye is going. This style thing, for me it's all fitted to the action, to the script, to the characters.

When I was making these damned pictures, I never knew about film noir. If you had asked me about it then, I probably would have pointed to something like Bill Wellman's The Ox Bow Incident, the best Western I ever saw and very much in the style of film noir I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross that defines what kind of drama it is.

A woman is just a script, but a cigar is a motion picture.

We have too many intellectuals who are afraid to use the pistol of common sense