- [on the difficulties of being a tall actor] You ever see a picture called The Flying Missile (1950)? I was in it, and Glenn Ford starred. We were on a submarine and I was looking out of the periscope all the time. Only it would look bad if we had to lower the periscope for Ford after I finished looking out of it. So I spent the whole picture crouched over.
- [on becoming a director] At last I can paint the whole canvas. How's that for a figure of speech, eh? When I was a character actor, I was painting only one color--blue or green, as it were. Now I can work on the whole movie.
- [on unnecessary violence in films] There have been violent pictures that were masterpieces. I think of pictures like Gone with the Wind (1939), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), "The Battle of Algiers" [aka The Battle of Algiers (1966)]) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). These pictures knew how to employ violence. I took my kid to see "Gone with the Wind", and the scene where the street is filled with dying soldiers, she found tremendously moving. But then she went to see Point Blank (1967)--I wouldn't have let her but, somehow, she went without me realizing what kind of movie it was--and here was all this brutality, shooting, torture. What does it mean in a context like that?
- My trouble as an actor was twofold: I was too tall and I wasn't handsome enough. Richard Widmark wanted me in a couple of movies, and they told him I was too tall; I'd make him look short. Widmark said what the hell, we can dig a hole. And I remember I was Robert Taylor's roommate in D-Day the Sixth of June (1956) and I had to sit down all the time. Yeah. I remember the scene where I was leaving and I was supposed to bid him goodbye. The director told me to sit on the bed. What's this? I said. I'm leaving, and I'm sitting on the bed? The director says, "Give him a can of beer or something. He can be drinking a can of beer, and then we cut to him outside the door".
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