The director is a bit analogous to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. It's a collaborative adventure. Nicholas Meyer More Quotes by Nicholas Meyer More Quotes From Nicholas Meyer Sure you can; the only question is whether you do it well. Nicholas Meyer wells I think that the reason that people are so up in arms about movies that have historical inaccuracies is because now that we've trashed our education institutions beyond repair, people fear that the only people are getting their histories is through the movies, so the elephant in the room is that no one wants to talk about why we're so passionately obsessed with accuracy. Nicholas Meyer elephantspeoplethinking With a historical novel you know that liberties are being taken. Since Walter Scott, we know that poetic license, dramatic license, that events been conflated and that liberties have been taken, characters ditto, dates rearranged. But people don't seem to understand that movies are fictions, they are dramatizations, at least historical movies, and we should accord the moviemakers some of the same understanding and latitude. When you go to a movie you know it's a dramatization and not history. Nicholas Meyer poetic-licensetakencharacter When you read a history or biography you are entitled to imagine that it is as accurate as the authors can make it. That research has gone into it and we say "This is a history of the civil war, this is a biography of Lincoln" whatever. But you don't make any such supposition when you say "This is a historical novel." Nicholas Meyer historical-novelsgonewar I wrote an article not so long ago that was published in the Los Angeles Times, and I think I titled it "Movies vs. History." But I think they had another title for it. I got sort of sick and tired of seeing movies that got picked apart by people because they had taken dramatic or poetic license and I said "These people don't understand the distinctions." Nicholas Meyer tiredtakenthinking I'm not really interested in the exploding car or endless sort of dystopian fantasies and superheroes. None of that... that doesn't interest me very much. Nicholas Meyer superherofantasycar I'm mainly interested in people trying to figure s#!t out. Nicholas Meyer figurestryingpeople I think all my Star Trek movies are very earthbound. Nicholas Meyer star-trek-moviestarsthinking What I want any genre to do, what I want any work of art to do, is to illuminate the human condition. Nicholas Meyer genrewantart But you have to understand what that really did is that it opened these DVDs to be sources of oral history instead of puff pieces for the studio, because people involved with them being in fear of being sued by somebody, so it became another form of movie history. I mean I didn't plan it, but I'm proud that it happened. Which is probably why they didn't interview me for this DVD. Nicholas Meyer dvdsmeanpeople Movie studios, Hollywood studios, by and large are not making the kind of movies that I go to see. Nicholas Meyer hollywood-studioshollywoodkind Having done, you know, science fiction, I didn't want to get trapped in science fiction. So my eclecticism was my only conscious choice. I didn't want to find myself in a niche that I couldn't get out of. Nicholas Meyer choicesdonefiction I never gave my career much strategic thought. Maybe I should have. Nicholas Meyer careersshouldshould-have We were extremely prescient in that we predicted the Soviet coup before it happened. That was kind of amazing. Nicholas Meyer coupssovietkind In fact, we've entered a world which is arguably much more dangerous than [being] eyeball to eyeball with the USSR. Nicholas Meyer eyeballsfactsworld The naive thing I suppose is simply that we thought, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, that we had reached the end of history and we were entering a brave new world minus the Soviet Union where everything was going to be peaches and cream. Nicholas Meyer brave-new-worldenteringunions Leo Tolstoy said the purpose of art is to teach you to love life. And that's what I want. Nicholas Meyer love-lifepurposeart
