Peter Mullan Quotes

No hard guy’s not scared when another hard guy’s knife is coming at you. You’re scared, obviously, but you’ve to act less scared than he is. It’s who is going to act less scared.

There’s a part of bohemia I love. The lack of prejudice, the lack of aggression, I love the lack, for the most part, of competitiveness. It’s more peaceful.

I’m not a huge kind of visual director. For me, it’s all about the acting. There’s no greater buzz than working with actors and seeing what they can do and how much they can improve on what you’d written. That will always be on the top of my list. It’s a real privilege to see it live before anyone else sees it.

In terms of popular cinema, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ is as near perfection as I can think of.

I know virtually no one of my age who can remember a hug, or a smile from their father, or a ‘Let’s go play football.’

In bringing the subject of religious oppression to a wider audience, I didn’t just want to kick the Catholic Church but to poke a finger in the throat of theocracy and to let it be known that people shouldn’t tolerate this anymore.

I guess I’m part of the art house, but we really have to shake up our ideas, because we’re kind of self-parodying ourselves. We go places commercial cinema doesn’t go, but sometimes it’s to our own detriment.

In the acting game, you spend a long time fighting against what the director perceives you to be. And half the time the directors don’t know.

There’s no such thing as an actor giving positive criticism to a director. The minute you say ‘Don’t you think it would look nicer…’, that director’s going to hate your guts. Particularly if it’s a good idea.

The Vatican is like a huge kind of magician’s club. The more you look into it the more awful it becomes. And they’re laughing at us. That’s when I get angry.

Life is much weirder than fiction; nothing’s more absurd.

Part of the reason why movie bosses are so obsessed with crime movies is because they know that world and the criminals. And that’s what they are – they would not hesitate to act illegally to achieve profit and gain.

A script is utterly useless in and of itself; it’s only of any worth the minute your actors, your designers, your directors come into being.

The films that I really enjoy now are films that are made by, for wont of a better word, mavericks.

I love acting. It’s the one job I know of where you can go in, go through complete catharsis – emotionally, physically sometimes and mentally – and at the end of the day say, ‘See you in the pub, guys.’

Watching people just look out for themselves, I think, is extremely interesting. It goes right back to something like ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ – the underbelly of society, how it operates, and how that reflects their so-called betters.

The working-class aspirations are worse now than when I was a kid – and it was pretty bad when I was a kid. Reality TV means they are being told they are no longer a working class, they’re an underclass. Young lassies want to be Jordan or Jade, but very few aspire to be the next Germaine Greer.

I don’t like the way some actors, when playing a nasty character, will try to grab hold of something good about them.

Just in relation to women, it’s not that huge an imaginative leap to see the connection between the Taliban and the Catholic Church.

What point is there to all the wealth and power that America may have if they can’t look after its own?

If I’m at home on my own and the writing isn’t going well, I clean my house. And there have been times in the past few years when my house has looked really clean.

I find the world more absurd now than I did when I was a kid.