A biography for Richard Attenboroughhasn’t been written yet.
“You act in a movie, and at the end of the day, the director and editor decide what your performance is.”
“I think 'E.T.' is a quite extraordinary piece of cinema.”
“And I believe we need heroes, I believe we need certain people who we can measure our own shortcomings by.”
“I do not have a brain that I long for in dealing with matters of which I am ignorant - that don't come within my ken and a rationale, a reason, an argument and so on - and I can't do that, and I'm not in that bracket at all.”
“I think it is obscene that we should believe that we are entitled to end somebody's life, no matter what that person has supposedly done or not done.”
“I'm not a great director or an auteur; I'm an ensemble director. I do think I can get wonderful performances out of actors.”
“'Gandhi' was a well-made film but surely not my best. It had flaws, which I understand two-and-a-half decades after I directed it. I will never call it a propaganda film for the Indian Congress, but it could have been made better had I concentrated on certain minute details.”
“I'm simply saying that heroes are people whose activities, whose attitudes, and whose judgment you just think, 'Wow. That's good. That's right. That's real.'”
“I have no great interest in being remembered as a great creative filmmaker.”
“I don't really like the Oscars; it's a commercial promotional event. It helps immeasurably to sell films, but it's hardly the Nobel prize.”
“I don't use film in the way that the great auteurs do. I use film, the camera, to record as effectively and as perceptive as I am able what I want to say through the actors.”
“Well, I think In Love and War, which had a wonderful performance by Sandy, Sandra Bullock, who the authorities and, the supposed authorities, in cinema didn't want to know about.”
“I like to make films about people who changed the lives of others and asserted human dignity.”
“I think Tom Paine is one of the greatest men that's ever lived.”
“I passionately believe in heroes, but I think the world has changed its criteria in determining who it describes as a hero.”
“I came from a family who believed in, in quotes, the Rights of Man: who believed that in order to justify the sort of luxurious life that the majority of us have, related to the whole world, that you had to do something.”
“What actually happened with 'Miracle' was that someone saw me in 'Jurassic Park' and said, 'We want someone with a white beard - how about him?' I've got a round face, white hair, a white beard. I can wear half-moon glasses and waddle a little, cope with a cane, raise my hat.”
“Say what you will about 'Miracle on 34th Street'; I can take my grandchildren to it. If I had a maiden aunt, I could take her, or my ma and pa if they were alive.”
“If you've ever seen the film In Which We Serve, but it was about a destroyer in the Mediterranean.”
“I'm a passionate trade unionist.”