Writer Quotes in Nate and Hayes (1983)

Captain Bully Hayes: [to an interviewer, while waiting to be hanged] Are you putting down in that book that I'm a pirate?

Writer: Well, in a manner of speaking, I suppose one could say that I am, yes.

Captain Bully Hayes: Good! Because I am! And a damn good one too. Oh, I never flew the skull and crossed bones. That's for your fictioneers. But I have sought pleasure and profit all my life at sea without regard for any man's law. That's not to say I didn't have my morals and standards. I got morals and standards. I never killed anyone who didn't have it coming. I never cheated an honest man. I never pillaged and I never raped.

Adult Pi Patel: Faith is a house with many rooms.

Writer: But no room for doubt?

Adult Pi Patel: Oh plenty, on every floor. Doubt is useful, it keeps faith a living thing. After all, you cannot know the strength of your faith until it is tested.

Adult Pi Patel: So which story do you prefer?

Writer: The one with the tiger. That's the better story.

Adult Pi Patel: Thank you. And so it goes with God.

Writer: [smiles] It's an amazing story.

Writer: I don't know what to say.

Adult Pi Patel: It's hard to believe, isn't it?

Writer: It is a lot to take in. To figure out what it all means.

Adult Pi Patel: If it happened, it happened. Why should it have to mean anything?

Writer: [reading off the report] Mr. Patel's is an astounding story, courage and endurance unparalleled in the history of ship-wrecks. Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.

[first lines]

Writer: So, you were raised in a zoo?

Adult Pi Patel: Born and raised. In Pondicherry, in what was the French part of India. My father owned the zoo, and I was delivered on short notice by a herpetologist, who was there to check on the Bengal monitor lizard. Mother and I were both healthy, but the poor lizard escaped and was trampled by a frightened cassowary. The way of karma, huh? The way of God.

Writer: So your story does have a happy ending.

Adult Pi Patel: Well, that's up to you. The story's yours now.

Writer: I didn't know Hindus said 'Amen.'

Adult Pi Patel: Catholic Hindus do.

Writer: Catholic Hindus?

Adult Pi Patel: We get to feel guilty before hundreds of gods instead of just one.

Adult Pi Patel: What has mamaji already told you?

Writer: He said you had a story that would make me believe in God.

Adult Pi Patel: [laughs] He would say that about a nice meal.

Adult Pi Patel: Now we have to send our little boy to the middle of the Pacific.

Writer: And make me believe in God.

Adult Pi Patel: Yes, we will get there.

Writer: Have I forgotten anything?

Adult Pi Patel: I think you set the stage. So far we have an Indian boy named after a French swimming pool on a Japanese ship full of animals heading to Canada.

Pi Patel: Then the ship sank. What else do you want from me?

Younger Insurance Investigator: A story that won't make us look like fools.

Older Insurance Investigator: We need a simpler story for our report. One our company can understand. A story we can all believe.

Pi Patel: [pause] So, a story without things you've never seen before.

Older Insurance Investigator: That's right.

Pi Patel: Without surprises, without animals, or islands?

Older Insurance Investigator: Yes, the truth.

Writer: [back to present, to Adult Pi Patel] So, what did you do?

Adult Pi Patel: I told them another story.

Writer: We are not responsible of our actions to any human-beings.

[talking about Anna Scott]

Writer: Oh, I see she took your grandmother's flowers.

William: Yeah... bitch.

Writer: [after lighting her cigarette] We share a flame, thousands of tiny molecules are heating up right now, they're penetrating our brain. Alright, they're stimulating our sexual desire. I mean, I don't know about you, but I find that shit very romantic. And you know, I'm so glad you walked over here because now I can feel a little bit more comfortable to tell you that I happen to be on the forefront of men able to find and locate a woman's G-spot, and I could - I could do that for you.

Call Girl: [Sarcastically] That's really generous of you, thank you.

Writer: Well, it's my pleasure. Well. It's your pleasure.

Call Girl: And what makes you think I haven't located it yet?

Writer: Uh, the way you hold the cigarette. It's a little high and tight. Y'know what you have to do, is you have to lower it. You have to bring it all the way down, in there, so it just sits. Comfortably. Y'know if it's high and tight like that, the whole body gets restricted and the... plexus? Gets closed off. Y'know and the vagina gets locked.

Writer: A man writes because he is tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that he's worth something. And if I know for sure that I'm a genius? Why write then? What the hell for?

Writer: My conscience wants vegetarianism to win over the world. And my subconscious is yearning for a piece of juicy meat. But what do I want?

Writer: [subtitled version] While I am digging for the truth, so much happens to it that instead of discovering the truth I dig up a heap of, pardon... I'd better not name it.

Stalker: The Zone is a very complicated system of traps, and they're all deadly. I don't know what's going on here in the absence of people, but the moment someone shows up, everything comes into motion. Old traps disappear and new ones emerge. Safe spots become impassable. Now your path is easy, now it's hopelessly involved. That's the Zone. It may even seem capricious. But it is what we've made it with our condition. It happened that people had to stop halfway and go back. Some of them even died on the very threshold of the room. But everything that's going on here depends not on the Zone, but on us!

Writer: So it lets the good ones pass and kills the bad ones?

Stalker: I don't know. I think it lets those pass who have lost all hope. Not good or bad, but wretched people. But even the most wretched will die if they don't know how to behave. You have been lucky, it just warned you.

Writer: You've made the right choice. Believe me, today is a good day for you. These are tough decisions, I know. But we intellectuals, and I say we because I consider you such, must remain lucid to the bitter end. This life is so full of confusion already, that there's no need to add chaos to chaos. Losing money is part of a producer's job. I congratulate you. You had no choice. And he got what he deserved for having joined such a frivolous venture so lightheartedly. Believe me, no need for remorse. Destroying is better than creating when we're not creating those few, truly necessary things. But then is there anything so clear and right that it deserves to live in this world? For him the wrong movie is only a financial matter. But for you, at this point, it could have been the end. Better to quit and strew the ground with salt, as the ancients did, to purify the battlefields. In the end what we need is some hygiene, some cleanliness, disinfection. We're smothered by images, words and sounds that have no right to exist, coming from, and bound for, nothingness. Of any artist truly worth the name we should ask nothing except this act of faith: to learn silence. Do you remember Mallarme's homage to the white page? And Rimbaud... a poet, my friend, not a movie director. What was his finest poetry?His refusal to continue writing and his departure for Africa. If we can't have everything, true perfection is nothingness. Forgive men for quoting all the time. But we critics... do what we can. Our true mission is... sweeping away the thousands of miscarriages that everyday... obscenely... try to come to the light. And you would actually dare leave behind you a whole film, like a cripple who leaves behind his crooked footprint. Such a monstrous presumption to think that others could benefit from the squalid catalogue of your mistakes! And how do you benefit from stringing together the tattered pieces of your life? Your vague memories, the faces of people that you were never able to love...

Writer: You see, what stands out at a first reading is the lack of a central issue or a philosophical stance. That makes the film a chain of gratuitous episodes which may even be amusing in their ambivalent realism. You wonder, what is the director really trying to do? Make us think? Scare us? That ploy betrays a basic lack of poetic inspiration.

Writer: Why piece together the tatters of your life - the vague memories, the faces... the people you never knew how to love?

Writer: Only the early Fitzgerald was great, then came an orgy of brutal realism.