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
People who can't think of anything else but whether the person you love is indented or convex should be doomed not to think of anything else but that, and so miss the other ninety-five percent of life.
And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made.
But time has caught up with it and I think vindicated it. Shampoo, too: very dark, very ambitious movie.
You're dumber than you think I think you are.
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.
I started doing it and I couldn't stop. It really tired the patience of the people around me.
Roman is hands-down the best director I've ever worked with, ... But all of the 1970s was a great era because the studios really left you alone. What has come to be called 'independent film,' you could really do within the studio system at that time.
One of the reasons for going back into the past is that it's almost the only place that there's any drama.
Of course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.
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.
To the extent of wanting me there and wanting to know everything about the scene, I think he realized it was important.
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.
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?
There was no scene between father and son, and there was a deep-seated need for the two protagonists in the story to face each other with the consequences of what had happened. Now he was able to express to his son that his whole life had been a struggle to prevent this very thing from happening.