I thought, this is one way of getting rich quick - I get the salary and, at most, it couldn't take two or three months. After I'd signed the contract, I found out that in the previous year all they'd had on screen was about seven minutes of film. I spent a year on it.
[on taking over the direction of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)] "I thought, this is one way of getting rich quick - I get the salary and, at most, it couldn't take two or three months. After I'd signed the contract, I found out that in the previous year all they'd had on screen was about seven minutes of film. I spent a year on it."
[on directing Marlon Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)] "Everything went off fine for a couple of weeks, and then suddenly we were doing a scene and Marlon spoke to the cameraman, right past me. He said: 'Look, I'll tell you, when I go like this, it means roll it, and this gesture means you stop the camera. You don't stop the camera until I give you the signal'. Well, I was amazed, but I didn't say anything about it."
Won the only ever Best Comedy Director Oscar (for Two Arabian Knights (1927)) at the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929.
Replaced Carol Reed as director of Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after Reed quit due to not being able to cope with the massive ego of the film's star Marlon Brando. Milestone didn't find Brando any easier to work with and in the end let Brando do as he pleased (when asked by the cameraman why he wasn't watching the filming Milestone replied, "I hate to see movies in pieces, so you let him do this and when it's all finished and cut, for ten cents I can walk into the theatre and see the whole thing at once. Why should I bother to look at it now.")
Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 770-778. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.
Among his close friends were Harold Lloyd, Gilbert Roland and Dana Andrews.
Born in Russia, Milestone emigrated to the US in 1917 in order to escape being drafted into the Russian army during World War I, but upon his arrival in the US immediately enlisted in the US Army and was sent to France, where he fought until the war's end.
A favorite device Milestone uses in most of his war films--i.e. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Edge of Darkness (1943), A Walk in the Sun (1945) and Pork Chop Hill (1959) is the dolly shot which moves across infantry attacking toward the camera in echelon and being felled one at a time by machine gun fire.
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