Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I really like my first movie a lot, 'Kicking and Screaming.' I think it's a - I'm very pleased and proud of that movie, but it wasn't the - it wasn't 'Citizen Kane' right out of the box, you know? It wasn't 'Sex, Lies and Videotape.'
In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?
I personally think 'Chimes of Midnight' is a much better film than 'Citizen Kane.'
You don't have to know anything about the Shakers to appreciate Mr. Copland's score for 'Appalachian Spring' any more than you have to know who William Randolph Hearst was to understand 'Citizen Kane.'
He was as fresh as is the month of May.
With George Clooney, the distinctive quality is a unique kind of American phoniness - charming because it's aware of itself as phony. It's as old as old Huck Finn, but, in our age, it has migrated from the fringes to the center.
We didn't even think about it, you know? I used to collect laser discs, and you'd have some college professor analyzing It's a Wonderful Life or Citizen Kane, and now it is pretty funny - the idea of commentary for a silly kid's movie, you know?
I now have two different audiences. There's the one that has been watching my action films for 20 years, and the American family audience. American jokes, less fighting.
There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane.
I mean, everyone says Citizen Kane. It isn't that great, anyway. And Orson Welles I knew well, of course. He made other incredible films that no one would let him make, which were much better than Citizen Kane, really.