Robert Towne Quotes

Every search for a hero must begin with something which every hero requires - a villain.

Larry Grobel senses there are no answers in life, only questions. Good ones.

I'm excited and encouraged to see people getting involved with their public lands and forests. We really need the public's help to repair these heavily used recreation sites.

If you have a good ear for dialogue, you just can't help thinking about the way people talk. You're drawn to it. And the obsessive interest in it forces you to develop it. You almost can't help yourself.

Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.

I'm not in business to be loved, but I am in business.

What makes screenplays difficult are the things that require the most discipline and care and are just not seen by most people. I'm talking about movement - screenwriting is related to math and music, and if you zig here, you know you have to zag there. It's like the descriptions for a piece of music - you go fast or slow or with feeling. It's the same.

If you can find meaning in the type of running you need todo to stay on this team, chances are you can find meaning in another absurd pastime: Life.

Finally, Colin Farrell showed up on my doorstep, only he wasn't Colin Farrell - he was just this Irish kid who had read the script and wanted to do it.

You're torn between wanting to fill in all the spaces and knowing that's really going to screw up the screenplay. And yet, how are you going to communicate it to people who really don't understand the process?

It was not possible to film in California, because all the areas are heavily built up now. Coming to Cape Town is an invitation to step into the past and recreate Los Angeles of the 1930s.

How much are you worth?
I have no idea. How much do you want?
Naw.I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?
Oh, my, yes.
Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!

Forget it, Jake -- it's Chinatown.

In dramatic writing, the very essence is character change. The character at the end is not the same as he was at the beginning. He's changed-psychologically, maybe even physically.

And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made.

It made me alive to the fact that the most important thing sometimes is what isn't said - to prepare for moments of revelation that can be read entirely on actors' faces without dialogue.

But, uh, censorship at that time said that you just absolutely couldn't do anything involving children and so we had to go from there. I don't remember what I changed it to. Duvall is just excellent in it.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.