Top 15 Roman Polanski Quotes

Gunson added that it was false to claim, as the present district attorney’s office does in their request for my extradition, that the time I spent in Chino was for the purpose of a diagnostic study.

On February 26 last, Roger Gunson, the deputy district attorney in charge of the case in 1977, now retired, testified under oath before Judge Mary Lou Villar in the presence of David Walgren, the present deputy district attorney in charge of the case, who was at liberty to contradict and question him, that on September 16, 1977, Judge Rittenband stated to all the parties concerned that my term of imprisonment in Chino constituted the totality of the sentence I would have to serve.

33 years ago I pleaded guilty, and I served time at the prison for common law crimes at Chino, not in a VIP prison. That period was to have covered the totality of my sentence. By the time I left prison, the judge had changed his mind and claimed that the time served at Chino did not fulfil the entire sentence, and it is this reversal that justified my leaving the United States.

Whenever I get happy, I always have a terrible feeling.

Berlin was great. It’s a new generation. If you continue to hate, you are entering into the same philosophy that began the war. You have to look forward at people and new times.

You know, whenever you do something new and original, people run to see it because it's different. Then, if it happens to be successful, the studios rush to imitate it. It becomes commonplace right away. But it's been like that before, I think. Now, the stakes are so gigantic that they cut each other's throats. So if most of the films are failures, then those that succeed so spectacularly, so commercially, become the norm. It's like a roulette for the studios. The problem with it is that it becomes more and more of a committee. Before, you dealt with the studio. It had one or two persons and now you have masses of executives who have to justify their existence and write so-called "creative notes" and have creative meetings. They obsess about the word creative probably because they aren't.

It's already getting more and more difficult to make an ambitious and original film. There are less and less independent producers or independent companies and an increasing number of corporations who are more interested in balance sheets than in artistic achievement. They want to make a killing each time they produce a film. They're only interested in the lowest common denominator because they're trying to reach the widest audience. And you got some kind of entropy. That's the danger; they look more alike, those films. The style is all melting and it all looks the same. Even young directors — for most of them, their only standard of achievement is how well their films do on the first weekend or whatever. It worries me. But then, from time to time, you have a film like The Usual Suspects or.... I'm trying to think of something American with some kind of originality... Pulp Fiction.

My films are the expression of momentary desires. I follow my instincts, but in a disciplined way.

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.

If you have a great passion it seems that the logical thing is to see the fruit of it, and the fruit are children.

There was no doubt about Sandra's experience and lack of inhibition. She spread herself and I entered her. She wasn't unresponsive. Yet, when I asked her softly if she was liking it, she resorted to her favorite expression: ‘It’s all right.’

We dried ourselves and each other. She said she was feeling better. Then, very gently, I began to kiss and caress her. After this had gone on for some time, I led her over to the couch.

'What's wrong?' I asked. She said her asthma was playing her up.… She was wheezing quite audibly by now. She picked up my towel and said, 'I'd better rest awhile; otherwise I might pass out.'

I can only say that whatever my life and work have been, I'm not envious of anyone — and this is my biggest satisfaction.

In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.