Every time I've been to Cannes, I've made up my mind never to return. Every time my vanity wins over. Show less «

Making a film is so hard that if you don't have your main actors going along with the ride with the rest of the crew it can make your life very difficult. Particularly within the Hollywood machine. They've allowed more stars to take over and it can make everyone else's life a misery. But the truth is the actors are doing their job just the same as the camera assistant and the costume designer and everybody else. Show less «

[meeting an unknown Paul Thomas Anderson at a parking lot after an event at the USC film school] As I pulled away I could see in my mirror a young man chasing after me, waving a videotape. He ran alongside, banging at the window. I stopped, wound down the window, and he thrust the videotape through the window saying he'd made a short film and really wanted me to look at it. The short was The Dirk Diggler Story (1988), which I looked at and thought was quite brilliant. Show less «

I was once described by one of my critics as an aesthetic fascist.

[in a January 1988 interview] It's not my job to make you comfortable in the cinema.

[on how he wrote his first screenplay Melody (1971)] I hadn't really thought about writing a screenplay at the time. I hadn't started directing, except for a few commercials in the basement of the agency where I worked. I was quite happy in advertising and had some success as a copywriter, so to get a film made of my script was as much a surprise as a thrill. (...) David Puttnam and Charles Saatchi (colleagues at the CDP ad agency) took me to lunch in Soho (Central London). They leaned across (the table), conspiratorially, and said, "Alan, we're thinking of going into film, and today we are going to discover you." I said, "Why are you discovering me? Why can't I discover you?" The plan was for me to write a script, and Charles to write a script, and Puttnam would attempt to sell them. I had never written anything longer than 30 seconds at the time, and so it was a shock when it got financed. Puttnam had obtained the rights to seven The Bee Gees songs from Robert Stigwood. This was 1969, and pre-Saturday Night Fever (1977)/falsetto Bee Gees - and so I wrote the script around the songs. There is a lyric in the song "The First of May" that went, "When we were small, and Christmas trees were tall, we used to love while others used to play," and I framed the story around that thought, mixed in with memories of my own childhood growing up in North London, mixed with a few memories from Puttnam. The film was mostly financed by Edgar M. Bronfman. Apparently his 16-year-old son, Edgar Bronfman Jr., read the script and recommended that his father make the movie. Edgar Jr. was also a production runner on the film. (...) It wasn't a big hit except, curiously, in Japan. I still get letters from fans of the film in Tokyo and Osaka. Creatively, it got us all started. Up to this point, I had no intentions of a film career, but on "Melody," I directed a small second-unit sequence, which was used, so probably I was bitten by the film bug then. Creatively, it has had an impact on other directors, as I have had many overtures, over the years, to remake it. Wes Anderson acknowledged that his film Moonrise Kingdom (2012) was inspired by "Melody." [Variety 2015] Show less «

I'm always afraid someone's going to tap me on the shoulder one day and say, "Back to North London".

[on Bugsy Malone (1976)] I had four young children and we used to go to a cottage in Derbyshire at weekends. On the long, boring car journey up there, I started telling them the story of a gangster called Bugsy Malone. They'd ask me questions and I'd make up answers, based on my memories of watching old movie reruns as a kid. I'd won a Bafta for a Play for Today, "The Evacuees", for the BBC in 1975. Now I was trying to get into movies. The British film industry was flat: nobody would finance my scripts because they were too "parochial". So I wrote an American film, choosing to fuse two classic Hollywood genres: the musical and the mob. It was my son Alex who said: "Can the heroes be kids?" I'd done plenty of adverts with children, but a feature film is a logistical nightmare: the legal constrictions, schooling, minimal hours allowed "under the lights". But I was just starting out. I was fearless and a bit naive. For casting, I lugged a video camera all over America, and even went to US airforce bases in the UK. We recorded almost 100 school Christmas shows and saw almost 10,000 kids. In a Catholic school in Brooklyn, I asked: "Who's the most badly behaved kid in the class?" Thirty kids pointed to one chubby little boy at the back. "Cassisi!" they screamed. John Cassisi put his hands up and smiled. Although he had never acted before, he yelled out lines from script with gusto. I knew right away we had our Fat Sam. Jodie Foster, who played his moll Tallulah, had made more films than I had, so probably knew more about film-making. She was 13 but had been acting since she was three, and had just filmed Taxi Driver (1976). She got on well with the cast, and certainly wasn't aloof, which she had every right to be. I suspect she relished being surrounded by kids for once, as she had spent her professional life surrounded by adults. Although Scott Baio, our Bugsy, was perfectly behaved on set, he was probably a handful for the chaperones. Each morning, he'd regale us with the antics from the night before. A starchy version of Cinderella was shooting at Pinewood at the same time we were there. Its makers constantly complained that our mini-gangsters were running up and down the corridors, terrorising the Cinderella cast in their crinolines and powdered wigs. The film was quite successful in the UK, but not in the US. Over the years, when I've done retrospectives, I've never included it, as I didn't think it fitted with the rest of my work. But curiously, as I get older, I realise it still looks modern. It hasn't dated. I'm rather proud of it. [2015, The Guardian] Show less «