“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”
Starring screen legend Paul Newman in one of his most iconic roles, COOL HAND LUKE (1967) appears across several of the American Film Institute’s lists of the greatest films of all time, including cinema’s most inspiring entries into the canon. Defiant in the face of authority of any kind, Newman’s Luke Jackson ranked among the art form’s greatest screen heroes, and the film also featured a quote that AFI counted as one of the movies’ most memorable – “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” That iconic line – and the rest of the inarguable film – was written by the legendary Frank Pierson, who served as the artistic director for the AFI Conservatory, then known as the Center for Advanced Film Studies.
Learn more about COOL HAND LUKE in the AFI Catalog.
