Bruno Heller Quotes (13 Quotes)

It was important to us to get the facts right, but more important the spirit of the times, to be very precise about this moment in history. It was important to get the fine detail right so that you felt that you were in a real world.

(He) must have been a very strange and brilliant man. He ... created a new way of operating a society that lasted for another 500 years.

He's a known character. We designed it so that when you see Caesar, it's through other people's eyes, it's how the people around him see him. Because, to a degree, a character like Caesar is always unknowable.

Caesar was frightening to be around ... if ever anyone was born to be a king, he was. But they (the Romans) had an ancestral fear of kings, similar to the American fear to a degree pride in their liberty.

I essentially took the seed of that idea to try to tell a big, historical epic, but from the street level, the everyman's point of view.

If there is an HBO style, it's a merciless attention to the truth and reality of things.

Film is still an art there, as opposed to an industry.

You can't understand that period of history unless it shocks you.

The novel aspect is that it's about everyday life in a time of great historical import.

Italy is still very much the same place it was 2,000 years ago. Italians are still the same ... there's a sense of beauty and a sense of dignity and a sense of living life to the full that infects everyone.

It was a moment in history that's pivotal in western history. If things hadn't turned out the way they did at that particular point, the world that we live in now would be very different ... It's the transformation of a republic into an empire. I think America is dealing with that issue just now.

I think it was a brutal time filled with people who were strangely sophisticated and uncivilized. Over the years movies tended to take a Victorian gentleman's view of this world all marbleized sets and men. But Caesar was a great warrior and writer and a war criminal, by our definition. ...There was a dichotomy between sophistication and viciousness that was specifically Roman.

Rome from street level. (It's) Rome from the point of view of ordinary people caught up in the extraordinary events of that time.