Robert Towne
Robert Towne
Robert Towneis an American screenwriter, producer, director and actor. He was part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking. His most notable work was his Academy Award-winning original screenplay for Roman Polanski's Chinatown, which is widely considered one of the greatest movie screenplays ever written. He also wrote its sequel The Two Jakes in 1990, and wrote the Hal Ashby comedy-dramas The Last Detail, and Shampoo, as well as the first two Mission Impossible films...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth23 November 1934
CityLos Angeles, CA
CountryUnited States of America
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.
I started doing it and I couldn't stop. It really tired the patience of the people around me.
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?
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.
Good dialogue illuminates what people are not saying
To the extent of wanting me there and wanting to know everything about the scene, I think he realized it was important.
Of course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.
One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any 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.
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.
Colin, Salma, me - none of us took salaries in order to make this movie, in order to get it on film. So it was a movie made on spec.
Initially I was weary of it. When something is first done you're looking at all the things you wanted there that are not there.
But in the end we were guided by my memory of the place.
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.