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Love is for me the supreme demonstration of mutual understanding, something that the representation of of the sexual act can't express. In that case why not go film bulls atop cows out in the fields? Today everybody thinks it's censorship if one doesn't see "love" on the screen. In reality this isn't love being shown but sex. The sexual act act is for every one, for every couple, something unique. When it is put into films, it's the inverse.

Andrei Tarkovsky
from an interview with Charles H. De Brantes, 1986

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How do you arrive at a story? Chance intervenes. You don't really know which path you are going to take. I believe deeply in chance. I had received a proposal to make a film on the theme of Frankenstein but actually in that genre. [It was to be a] completely commercial project. As I was desperate to make my first film and I'm very obedient, I started writing a conventional Frankenstein movie. But when I started to do the budget, chance happily intervened in my favour because that kind of film needs a lot of sets, and well-known actors, and the producer had to admit he didn't have quite enough funds. So I then proposed a Spanish version ofFrankenstein - not quite so extravagant, without big sets and with only four weeks of filming. He liked that idea. But now I found myself with a very big problem. I wasn't quite sure what to do exactly. On my work desk I had cut out a picture, a frame from James Whale'sFrankenstein, that moment when the monster and the child are together. It was there hanging in my room and I saw it every day, and then I understood that in that image everything was contained. So I called on my own personal experiences and I felt that the identification with the child and the film would be far greater if the infant was also a girl, as opposed to a boy. And so gradually the story started unfolding.

Victor Erice

from an interview with BFI, 2003

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BERGMAN: I've always had a huge complex, great misgivings, about my own writing. There are people who have often said, perhaps justifiably, that I am no writer, which, in fact, I never claimed to be. In the past I was haunted by these misgivings as well as by the fear of not getting it right. It was an obstacle to my writing, which came down to an act of willpower with the accompanying tensions and inhibitions. There was so much I had to overcome. During the last few years, I've stopped worrying about what people might say about what I am doing, because - It's not that I don't care, but I can never please everybody anyway. I'll find no mercy among those who dislike what I'm doing anyway. I think I've calmed down a bit on that point. It will take the form it takes.

SJOMAN: Was there a period when you tried to please everyone?

BERGMAN: Working in this medium and being a man of the theatre, I'm like the common whore. I have an enormous need for people to like me and what I'm doing. That it be accepted and praised and so forth. It's always painful to be disapproved of.

Ingmar Bergman

from Ingmar Bermgan Makes a Movie (1963)

interview with Vilgot Sjöman

Back

After an extended absence owed to music video production, Opinions on Filmmaking* is back and its sister blog, Paused Motion, should return soon.

*which seems more and more like Robert Bresson's Opinions on Filmmaking, but that's besides the point.

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CAMERON: [Why do you show] the doves which land on the gauze roof of the pavilion [in The Trail of Joan of Arc]?

BRESSON: There is no symbolism in this. I don't like symbolism. It is only to show that life is going on.

Robert Bresson

from an interview with Ian Cameron (1962)

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CAMERON: What do you expect the audience to bring to your films?

BRESSON: Not their brains, but their capacity for feeling.

Robert Bresson

from an interview with Ian Cameron (1962)

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Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

William Faulkner

from an interview with The Paris Review, 1956