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Home
Authors
Robert Towne
American
Actor
About the author
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.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#Now
#Film
#Past
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?
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#People
You're dumber than you think I think you are.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#Past
#Drama
Now they're attracted to one another, but repelled by their ethnic origins, so that there was something to overcome. They had to overcome their own prejudices, which had been imposed by the culture - their own shame at being Mexican and Italian.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#Now
#Being
#Culture
#Shame
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.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#Fact
#Actors
#Moments
#Faces
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.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#Talk
#People
#Thinking
#Help
#Interest
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.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#People
#Public
#Help
#Recreation
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.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#Life
#Film
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.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#Irish
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.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#Time
#Children
#Censorship
But time has caught up with it and I think vindicated it. Shampoo, too: very dark, very ambitious movie.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#Time
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.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#Work
#Friend
#Writer
Of course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.
Robert Towne,
American
Actor
#Old
#Ugly
#Politicians