.

How shall I say? Productions of movies are not always smooth, and you have to be the lion tamer of the most unexpected.

Werner Herzog
from a press junket (watch clip here)

BBL

I'm on the verge of making my first feature film. Opinions on Filmmaking will resume in 2010. Thanks for reading!

.

I'm believing more and more in the necessity of improvisation...

I've often noticed that that which I've not been able to resolve on paper, if I resolve it on location, whilst filming, it's that which I do the best.

Robert Bresson
from the pressbook for Lancelot du Lac (read full)

.

In his (Dieter Dengler's) real story...there was real torture, very nasty torture. I never felt comfortable with number one filming it and keeping it in the film (Rescue Dawn) because I always when I make a film see it like a spectator. As a spectator, I do not want and do not like to see physical violence against the defenseless. I do not want to see the rape of a woman. I do not want to see torture of a man in handcuffs. A couple of these scenes were filmed because they happened to be in the screenplay. When you read it on paper, it looks different than when you really do it in physical life and you do it for the camera. Most of these scenes are deleted. I always had a feeling they should be deleted and I had a big confrontation with a producer one of these days and I predicted they would be out and they are out now. I’m very confident with the way it is.

Werner Herzog
from an interview with MoviesOnline

.

It didn't matter to me whether or not Shadows would be any good; it just became a way of life where you got close to people and where you could hear ideas that weren't full of shit. We had no intention of offering it for commercial distribution. It was an experiment all the way, and our main objective was just to learn. Not one actor was paid for his services, nor were the technicians given anything. What kept us going was enthusiasm. We were working for the fun of doing something we wanted to do. It is more important to work creatively than to make money. We would never have been able to finish if all the people who participated in the film hadn't discovered one absolutely fundamental thing: that being an artist is nothing other than the desire, the insane wish to express yourself completely, absolutely.

John Cassavetes
from Cassavetes on Cassavetes

.

I couldn't show violence, the blood, and those terrible things, because it would have been faked for the movie. People would say, "How did they do that?"

I understand your objection.

Sometimes you see things well done of this sort, but it is not moving - because you know it is false, because it is forced. But what you can do is have the sensation of death. You can be moved by death if you don't show it, if you suggest it. But if you show it, it's finished. The same thing about love. You don't feel love if you see two people making love.

Robert Bresson
from an interview with Paul Schrader (1976)
published in Film Comment in 1977 (read full)

.

Quite possibly the greatest filmmaker interview I've ever read.

Robert Bresson

.

I am the opposite of a writer. To make a film you must do everything yourself. To make an adaptation you must find in the book what could be inside yourself, what corresponds with your own observations. For the subject I've now been working on for many months I took notes on pieces of paper and put them together and waited, as I always do, till I thought the time had come to write the script. But I'm less and less in a hurry. I let things come instead of going to them. When I start writing the script I try much harder than I used to to see and hear the things together. Sometimes I write three or four lines—perhaps ten—of dialogue, which comes into my head, just like that. Then with that I try to make a filmscript. The dialogue is made inside my head and this dialogue, when I have finished it, I take apart and try to rewrite it fifty times. I'm not a writer but I want it to be mine.

[...]

How did you arrive at the idea for the film (Au hasard Balthazar)?

Some years ago I had the idea for the film and I wanted to write it as soon as I'd finished shooting the film I was working on. The first morning, nothing came, and I had to stop. I tried many times to write it and I couldn't. I made a lot of notes and that's all. But one day I said, "I'll have to write it or the film will never be made." Then I wrote it down in two days. In the meantime I had the two big ideas for the construction: for the donkey, as for a man, if you see the time when he studies and then the time when he works, then death approaching, then the mystical time before dying, then the death, as for a human being. The other idea was to make him pass through all the vices of humanity. Then it was easier for me to write it down on paper.

Robert Bresson

from an interview in Transatlantic Review, Summer 1973 (read full)

.

I know something that young filmmakers need to learn very early on: a perfect film does not exist. Filmmakers will always, no matter how much time they tinker away at this scene or that frame, have a sense that there are defects in their films that are amplified a thousand times in front of audiences. As a filmmaker, you simply have to learn to live with this, the same way a parent has to live with his children. One might have a stammer, the other has a squint, the third one limps. But you love them even more because they are not perfect. To you there is a certain perfection there anyway, no matter what anyone else thinks.

Werner Herzog
from Herzog on Herzog

.

It's well known that when you let actors improvise, you have to start with a fixed idea and direct the improvisation in a certain direction, otherwise it doesn't work. Nothing happens - apart from using up loads of film. You have to sow the seeds. You create characters out of dust and blow life into them. You have to have some sort of plan, a plan that you impose on the actors, whether they're conscious of it or not. Then they can carry on working on the characters that you've given them.

Lars von Trier
from Trier on von Trier

An explanation

As I've posted much earlier, I take pride in keeping myself out of this blog, choosing to let comments be left to master filmmakers. However, I want to take an opportunity to explain something which may have caused some confusi0n.

You're sure to have noticed that Robert Bresson and Werner Herzog are quoted more frequently on here than any other filmmakers. There is a reason for this, aside from the fact they are two of my absolute favorite filmmakers. For the past few months, I have been studying the work of these directors in a self-conscious attempt to learn from them. By December, I will have finished studying both of them. There will continue to be quotations from both throughout the lifespan of this blog, but you will find more quotes coming in from other directors as I do a major focus on their works.

Directors I plan to study in 2010 include Andrei Tarkovsky, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Michael Haneke & Federico Fellini, so starting in January you will see more quotations from them. As I've done this year, I will also be posting snippets from other filmmakers I'm not exhaustively studying as I read interviews with them after watching thier individual films.

I hope you're enjoying this blog.

Jason LaRay Keener

.

It's not a question of understanding, it's a question of feeling, which is not exactly the same thing.

Robert Bresson
from a press conference for L'Argent at Cannes
as seen in The Road to Bresson (1984)

.

If with this film (Au hasard Balthazar) I succeed in touching the public, it is especially, as happens in literature, thanks to that autobiographical element....The beginning of the film bathes in my childhood - the countryside, the fields, the trees, and the animals - these are my vacations as a child and an adolescent.

Robert Bresson
from an interview with Yvonne Baby, Le Monde (1966)

.

I don't care about that scum! Why should I receive a prize?! I know that I'm a genius!

Klaus Kinski
from My Best Fiend (1999)
paraphrased by Werner Herzog

.

The difficulty is that all art is both abstract and suggestive at the same time. You can't show everything. If you do, it's no longer art. Art lies in suggestion. The great difficulty for filmmakers is precisely not to show things. Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that's impossible. So things must be shown from one sole angle that evokes all other angles without showing them. We must let the viewer gradually imagine, hope to imagine, and keep them in a constant state of anticipation. This goes back to what I said earlier about showing the cause after the effect.

We must let the mystery remain. Life is mysterious, and we should see that on-screen. The effects of things must always be shown before their cause, like in real life. We're unaware of the causes of most of the events we witness. We see the effects and only later discover the cause.

Robert Bresson
from Un metteur en ordre (1966)

.

All art is a single person’s work. But a film is created by a collectivity, and a collectivity cannot create art unless an artistic personality stands behind it and acts as its driving force.

The first creating impulse for a film comes from the writer whose work is the actual foundation for the film. But from the moment the poetic foundation is laid, it is the director’s task to give the film its style. The many artistic details are born through his initiative. It ought to be his feelings and moods that color the film and that awaken corresponding feelings and moods in the spectator’s mind. Through the style he infuses the work with a soul–and that is what makes it art. It is for him to give the film a face–namely his own.

Because it is like this, we directors have a very large responsibility. We have it in our hands to lift the film from industry to art, and, therefore, we must go to our work with seriousness, we must want something, we must dare something, and we must not jump over where the fence is lowest. If film as an art is not to come to a standstill, we must work to create a mark of style, a mark of personality in the film. Only from this can we expect renewal.

Carl Th. Dreyer
from Thoughts on My Metier (read full)

.

The society we live in is drenched in violence. I represent it on the screen because I am afraid of it, and I think it is important that we should reflect on it. All my films deal with issues that I find socially relevant, and all my films deal with my own fears. I am dealing with questions that I find oppressive or important, that interest me dramatically. I think that the things that are going well in society are difficult to present dramatically. In my 20 years of working in the theater, I only staged one comedy, and that was my single failure. My films are also a protest against the mainstream cinema, a response to the films screened in theaters today. If mainstream films were different, my films would be different as well.

Michael Haneke
from an interview with Bright Lights Film Journal (read full)

.

It (Paranormal Activity) illustrates one of my favorite points, that silence and waiting can be more entertaining than frantic fast-cutting and berserk f/x. For extended periods here, nothing at all is happening, and believe me, you won't be bored.

Roger Ebert
from a review of Paranormal Activity (2007) [read full]

.

It's very easy to tell the truth in fiction, and particularly in fantasy. The Grimms' fairy tales were political when they were first written. To me, it's a good way to use the genre… and so few people do it. So I'm perfectly content. I have this thing going now, and if I feel like talking about something, I can use zombies and talk about it. And it's fine. I think in some ways, it actually gets the point across more. It would be very hard to write a serious drama and say some of these things. You can be much more abstract and allusive with horror, and it's very forgiving to the author. You don't necessarily have to take an absolutely positive position. You can just write whatever.

George A. Romero
from an interview with the A.V. Club (read full)

.

Well, when you're dealing with Halloween or any kind of horror movie like that, you're dealing in very familiar territory. You have Psycho as kind of the granddaddy of that kind of movie. Not that it's the greatest ever made, but it's the one that influenced everyone. That principle of the suspense, the Hitchcock suspense thing, of showing the bomb and you can get much more suspense than surprise is true, but what you can do is: once you establish the suspense, then you can do your shocks along the way, and that'll scare the hell out of people. They'll go completely crazy. They know something's gonna happen. In a horror movie, you go and you know something is gonna happen. The question is when?

John Carpenter
from a video interview (watch here)

.

(on 35mm vs. digital video)

I think the source is not important. It’s the ideas supplied by the DP that are the important things.

Freddie Francis
from an interview with MJSimpson.co.uk (read full)

I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers.

Werner Herzog
from Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans press kit.

.

The sound film has, above all, invented silence. I find explanatory dialogue marvelous and convenient. But the ideal would be, rather, that the dialogue would accompany the characters, just as a sleigh-bell accompanies a horse, or buzzing accompanies a bee….

Robert Bresson
from his essay "Rhythm Comes from Within"
(italics from source material)

.

Models who have become automatic (everything weighed, measured, timed, repeated ten, twenty times) and are then dropped in the medium of the events of your film - their relations with objects and persons around them will be right because they will not be thought.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer (read full)

.

It (Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage) made a deep impression on me. I was deeply shaken by that film. Not that I understood it or anything. I rather think I was struck by its enormous cinematographic power. It was an entirely emotional experience. I can still remember it. I remember certain sequences, certain scenes that made an enormous impression on me.

Ingmar Bergman
from an unknown filmed interview [watch here]

.

I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work. But in this book of screenplays by Krzysztof Kieslowski and his co-author, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it should not be out of place to observe that they have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what's really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don't realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.

Stanley Kubrick
from The foreword to Kieslowski & Piesiewicz's Decalogue (1991)

.

There is no doubt that a good story has always mattered, and the great novelists have generally built their work around strong plots. But I've never been able to decide whether the plot is just a way of keeping people's attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot is really more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us on an unconscious level which affects us in the way that myths once did. I think, in some ways, the conventions of realistic fiction and drama may impose serious limitations on a story. For one thing, if you play by the rules and respect the preparation and pace required to establish realism, it takes a lot longer to make a point than it does, say, in fantasy. At the same time, it is possible that this very work that contributes to a story's realism may weaken its grip on the unconscious. Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas. Fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious. I think the unconscious appeal of a ghost story, for instance, lies in its promise of immortality. If you can be frightened by a ghost story, then you must accept the possibility that supernatural beings exist. If they do, then there is more than just oblivion waiting beyond the grave.

I believe fantasy stories at their best serve the same function for us that fairy tales and mythology formerly did. The current popularity of fantasy, particularly in films, suggests that popular culture, at least, isn't getting what it wants from realism. The nineteenth century was the golden age of realistic fiction. The twentieth century may be the golden age of fantasy.

Stanley Kubrick
from an interview with Michel Ciment (read full)

.

The kind of written work I'm going to talk about is story-writing, because that's the only kind I know anything about. I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as the "technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

Flannery O'Connor
from The Nature and Aim of Fiction (read full)

Blogger's Note: I pride myself on staying out of my own blog posts, however, the inclusion of a non-filmmaker warrants some explanation: I am a great admirer of O'Connor and I believe a lot of her advice carries over to screenwriting. This doesn't mean that exceprts from essays by novelists and other non-filmmakers are going to become the norm, but it does mean that you can probably expect more O'Connor in the future because it is my firm belief that any form of writer can learn a great deal from her.

Her posts will usually be tagged as "screenwriting."

.

One thing I realized very early on, practically in my very first film, was the importance of sound quality if a film was to succeed. I have often seen young filmmakers who when they finally manage to make their first film - when they finally overcome the problems of finance and organization and all the rest - frequently fail with their use of sound. It is because of this that I have spent some time concentrating on how sound functions in cinema. Almost all my films have been shot in direct sound, which means it takes more time and energy to prepare. Often it takes more time preparing the sound than setting up the shot and determining where the camera will move. But it is sound that will decide the outcome of many battles on a film set. Good sound adds dimensions to a film that you never ever knew existed. Someone like Bresson was very aware of this, and in each of his films he gives us so many silences, yet every one different and full of noise. Compare his subtlety with a film like Apocalypse Now, where the sound is not handled well conceptually and where the sledgehammer effects are constantly hitting you over the head. It is like watching very early colour films which have absurdly bright primary colours screaming out at you.

Werner Herzog
from Herzog on Herzog

.

BOGDANOVICH: It's (voice-over narration) supposed to be "uncinematic."

WELLES: I know, it's a great mystery. Yes, it is. It's one of the great forms of cliches...that narration is "uncinematic." It's nonsense.

BOGDANOVICH: Isn't your feeling about movies that whatever is effective is cinematic?

WELLES: Of course....

BOGDANOVICH: If it works, it doesn't matter.

WELLES: And I think words are terribly important in talking pictures. It's not true that words don't matter, you know?

BOGDANOVICH: Yeah. No, I agree.

WELLES: And it's true that you get a bigger impact with whatever's visual, but that isn't to say that the words are all that incidental. I think there's an awful lot of talking in all my pictures. I have no aversion to, to...

BOGDANOVICH: A lot of talk.

WELLES: A lot of talk.

ORSON WELLES
from This is Orson Welles (taped interview)

.

OFFSCREEN: When you look back on your work, do you think it functions more as a series of strong illuminating moments than as an ongoing exploration of themes, narratives…?

HERZOG: No, I am a storyteller. These moments would not exist without everything that leads to it. If you show the last sequence of Land of Silence and Darkness to anyone, it does not make any impact at all. It’s a very average image. A man stands up from a bench and walks towards a tree. You notice that he must be blind because he bumps into some branches and starts to touch the stem, the trunk... That’s all there is, nothing more. Only in context, after spending nearly 90 minutes in the world of blind and deaf people, with the knowledge preparing your heart, your mind and your spirituality for something extraordinary, which is in the image, only then will you be able to see it.

OFFSCREEN: So would the image of the baby in Stroszek be an exception in that matter? Something that really stands on it’s own, that is self-sufficient in its power and beauty regardless of the story?

HERZOG: No it is not. It is also only because of the tremendous suffering of Stroszek, the torment of his soul…Only having seen that and following that, only then and in context, does the shot become extraordinary. These moments do not exist per se.

Werner Herzog
from an interview with Offscreen (2004)

.

Subject, technique, actors' style go by fashion. Result, a sort of prototype, which one film every two or three years changes for a new one.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

.

I prefer to make deep impact for one spectator than make impact for two hours for a million people. If I would get huge audiences for one of my films I think I would have failed.

Aki Kaurismäki
from an interview with theage.com.au

.

HERZOG: ...I keep wondering about your films. How, for example, you establish, in a very, very subtle way, something that is complete and utter primal fear. I've never been scared so deeply as in, for instance, in The Silence of the Lambs.

DEMME: Hmmm.

HERZOG: I've never been scared as this, and you can't scare me easily.

DEMME: I believe that. ...um, I can't respond to that.

HERZOG: No, but, well, I give the answer instead of you. We are...

DEMME: Thank you.

HERZOG: We are just professional men who know how to handle cinema. And we've learned it the hard way, through lots of defeats. And that's what made us into what we are.

DEMME: Hmmm.

HERZOG: I'm a result of defeats.

Werner Herzog & Jonathan Demme
from an interview for the Museum of the Moving Image (2008)

.

Dark comedy is the most intelligent kind of comedy. It's the sort of comedy where it makes you laugh, but if it's cruel or if it's strange or not what you're expecting, it makes you think about why you were laughing.

The most important thing is to not try and please anybody other than yourself and to not try to impress anybody 'cause a lot of people worry about their decisions too much: what an audience will think and if they'll be able to sell it and all these things that aren't important. You just need to focus on what you're doing.

Don Hertzfeld
from La nuit s'anime interview (2002)

.

See beings and things in their separate parts. Render them independent in order to give them a new dependence.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

Supplement:

(paraphrasing Le corps au cinema: Bresson, Keaton, Cassavetes by Vincent Amiel)

Amiel quotes a long letter written by Rilke after seeing Rodin's workshop in Paris; the poet was so overwhelmed by seeing yards and yards of fragments that he began to suspect that viewing the body as a whole is more the job of the scholar, while that of the artist is to create new unities out of smaller, disparate elements....

Joseph Cunneen
from Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film

When I was at film school they said that all good films were characterized by some form of humour. All films, apart from Dreyer's! A lot of his films are totally "vacuum-cleaned" of humour. In a sense you could say that when you imbue your film with humour, you're establishing a certain distance from it. You create a distance. With this film (Breaking the Waves) I didn't want to distance myself from the emotions contained in the plot and the characters.

I think that this strong engagement with emotions was very important for me, because I grew up in a home - a culturally radical home - where strong emotions were forbidden.

Lars von Trier
from Trier on von Trier

What matters to me is that the feeling excited by my films should be universal. An artistic image is capable of arousing identical feelings in viewers, while the thoughts that come later may be very different. If you start to search for a meaning during the film you will miss everything that happens. The ideal viewer is someone who watches a film like a traveler watching the country he is passing through: because the effect of an artistic image is an extra-mental type of communication. There are some artists who attach symbolic meaning to their images, but that is not possible for me. Zen poets have a good way of dealing with this: they work to eliminate any possibility of interpretation, and in the process a parallel arises between the real world and what the artist creates in his work.

What then is the purpose of this activity? It seems to me that the purpose of art is to prepare the human soul for the perception of good. The soul opens up under the influence of an artistic image, and it is for this reason that we say it helps us to communicate - but it is communication in the highest sense of the word. I could not imagine a work of art that would prompt a person to do something bad. There can be no talk of art in relation to films like The Exterminator. My purpose as far as possible is to make films that will help people to live, even if they sometimes cause unhappiness - and I don't mean the sort of tears that Kramer vs. Kramer produces. Perhaps you have noticed that the more pointless people's tears during a film, the more profound the reason for the tears. I am not talking about sentimentality, but about how art can reach to the depths of the human soul and leave man defenseless against good.

Andrei Tarkovsky
from an interview with Ian Christie (1981)

The number of films that are patched up with music! People flood a film with music. They are preventing us from seeing that there is nothing in those images.

It is only recently and gradually that I have suppressed the music and have used silence as an element of composition and means to emotion. Must say this or incur dishonesty.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

In general, a stationary picture shows the result of an action, whereas a film shows the action itself. A stationary picture mostly appeals to an observer's empathy with the victim, whereas generally in film the viewer is placed in the role of the perpetrator. When looking at Picasso's Guernica, for instance, we see the victims' pain for the eternity of viewing: solidarity with the victims, without moral stumbling blocks. But in the massacre in Coppola's Apocalypse Now (with Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' playing in the background) we are in the helicopter, firing at the stampeding Vietnamese below us, and we do this all without a bad conscience, because - at least in the moment of action - we are not aware that we are adopting this role.

Michael Haneke
from 'Beleiving not Seeing'
a Sight & Sound London Film Festival Supplement

You start out extremely young and make an extremely young picture. As you get older, you make pictures about the way you feel at the time. You don't think logically. You think in terms of mysterious elements of your life. I'm interested in middle-aged people because I'm in that generation and share their concerns. I'd feel completely incapable of making a film like Shadows about young people now. It's not a question of being indifferent towards young people's problems, but their experience of life and their goals and ambitions don't connect with my own personal preoccupations. I'm only interested in what I am interested in. That's what makes the film what it is. The minute it becomes a professional film, it is exploitative. It's trying to sell you something. It's trying to get you to buy it. A lot of bad movies are made because people are trying to make a living. The good ideas are the things that mean something to you. There's plenty to say without having to be dishonest and make a movie you don't care about.

John Cassavetes
from Cassavetes on Cassavetes

So, when we were out in the lobby, I overheard you giving advice to one of our young film students in one of our documentary filmmaking programs and you said, very simply, "Don't listen to film theory." Can you expand on that for us?

Oh, whenever I get in touch with people who are into this vapid babble about post-structuralism in cinema and image-making and post-whatever, I just lower my head and charge. It's just useless. I don't know what drives these people. And whoever is interested in making films, my simple advice is: grab a camera. Today, it's easier than 30, 40 years ago where you only had big celluloid cameras. Grab a camera, there is no excuse anymore, and do it! Learn by suffering defeats, learn by walking in this field and that's what makes you into a filmmaker.

Film theory is just a growing disease. And the worst, the worst actually, you find at Harvard University. They're such losers. It's just unbelievable. Happy new year, losers!

Werner Herzog
from Q&A at the Jacob Burns Film Center (2008)

You have to go with your sensibility. There is nothing else. I've been called an intellectual, but of course I'm not. Writing is unbelievably difficult, but I have to do it, because everything must originate with me. I've been called a Jansenist, which is madness. I'm the opposite. I'm interested in impressions. I'll give you an example, taken from L'Argent. When I'm on the Grands Boulevards, the first thing I think is, "How do they impress me?" And the answer is that they impress me as a mass of legs and a sound of feet on the pavements. I tried to communicate this impression by picture and by sound ... There has to be a shock at the moment of doing, there has to be a feeling that the humans and things to be filmed are new, you have to throw surprises on film. That's what happened in the scene on the Grands Boulevards. ... I could feel the steps, I focused on the protagonist's legs, and that way I could propel him through the crowd to where he needed to be. That's the Grands Boulevards, as far as I'm concerned, all the motion. Otherwise, I might as well have used a picture postcard. The thing that struck me when I used to go to the cinema was that everything had been wanted in advance, down to the last detail. ... Painters do not know in advance how their picture is going to turn out, a sculptor cannot tell what his sculpture will be, a poet does not plan a poem in advance. ...

You will have noticed in L'Argent there are a series of close-ups whose only function is to add sensation. When the father, a piano-player, drops a glass, his daughter is in the kitchen. Her dustpan and sponge are ready. I do not then enter the room, but cut immediately to a close shot which I like very much, the wet floor with the sound of the sponge. That is music, rhythm, sensation. ... Increasingly, what I am after - and with L'Argent it became almost a working method - is to communicate the impressions I feel.

Robert Bresson
from an interview with Michel Ciment (1983)
abridged by Kent Jones for BFI Modern Classics: L'Argent

When you go out to shoot a film with all these people it's physically very demanding. It's almost like you're going through a marble quarry and you're carving a big chunk off the side of the hill, hoisting it down and taking it back. Then when you are in the editing room, you start sculpting it and you might have thought it was a horse, but it turns out to be a moose.

The editing really becomes a way of letting the materials speak to you, telling you "this is what I want to be." When you impose your preconceived ideas rigorously on the material, then it tends to object.

Jim Jarmusch
from Digital Babylon

Suspense is really an expression of fear. We can build that in our storytelling by withholding information. Frankly, it's a manipulation but in using that manipulation, it also empowers the story. Not knowing where we're going to go next is the thing that human beings hate the most. We'd all like to know where we're going, if it's gonna be alright.

My editing process is an intuitive process. It's what feels truthful, it's what feels strong, and it's what works. You hear this from a lot of editors. I mean, Dede Allen always used to say to me, "You know, I cut with my gut," and she's right.

Craig McKay
from The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing

Can you talk a little about how you went about staging the sex scenes in the film between Kate Winslet and Patrick Wilson (in Little Children)? I’m not trying to be cute or get salacious details–those sequences have a raw emotional power to them that takes them out of the realm of mere titillation and was curious as to how you achieved that.

I’ve been in this position myself as a young actor, which is that people always think of such things as “the sex scene”–even the filmmakers and writers and actors think of them as “the sex scene” and I didn’t want that and Kate and Patrick certainly didn’t want that. They understood that these were scenes that were about something–there were things to act within them and they just happened to have their clothes off. What we did, so that we could concentrate on the scene instead of the titillation factor and the odd strangeness of being like that around 200 people, was to send the entire crew on an extended coffee break for two days. Kate and Patrick and I went into the house alone with a sound man to operate the mike and an assistant cameraman to load for me and pull focus while I operated the camera. We talked through every scene practically and then we shot. It was very comfortable, it wasn’t strange and we were able to focus on the intent of the scenes so that Kate and Patrick could get the most out of them with their performances.

Todd Field
from an interview with Peter Sobczynski

When screenwriting, be prepared to drop your pants and show your dirty laundry.

Paul Schrader
from Filmaka inspiration quote

Do you think the promo video (music video) is going to be a useful new genre for new filmmakers to develop ideas?

Well, I doubt it only because they're so small and also, I don't personally think that commercials are a very good way of learning to make film, to make narrative films, story pictures. I think that the emphasis in them is a great deal too much on effect. I think it was better in my day, if you like, when I learned a bit making documentaries and that gave you, I think, more opportunity of learning about film, about cinema, then it does trying to make these very snappy, purely effected commercials or promos.

Lindsay Anderson
from an unidentified video interview I found on YouTube

One distinct disadvantage in your kind of films is that however much people enjoy them, they hate to admit that they've been taken in. Their admiration is often mitigated by a tinge of resentment. It's as if they begrudged you to the pleasure you give them.

Of course. They come to the theater and they sit down and say, "All right. Now, show me!" And they want to be one jump ahead of the action: "I know what's going to happen." So, I have to take up the challenge: "Oh, you know what's going to happen. Well, we'll just see about that!"

Alfred Hitchcock
from Hitchcock by François Truffaut

Gestures and words cannot form the substance of a film as they form the substance of a stage play. But the substance of a film can be that...thing or those things which provoke the gestures and words and which are produced in some obscure way in your models. Your camera sees them and records them. So one escapes from the photographic reproduction of actors performing a play; and cinematography*, that new writing, becomes at the same time a method of discovery (does so because a mechanism gives rise to the unknown, and not because one has found this unknown in advance.)

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

*..."cinematography" for Bresson has the special meaning of creative filmmaking which thoroughly exploits the nature of film as such. It should not be confused with the work of a cameraman.
- annotation from Notes on the Cinematographer

The trick to magic is directing our attention wherever the magician wants to, and this is surely also one of the secrets of cinema. As a director, you must be capable of pushing and pulling the audience's attention in whatever direction the story demands. After all, the great pioneer of early cinema, George Méliès, was actually a magician before he became a filmmaker. As Jeff (Sheridan) said during his demonstration, the whole point of the magician is to destroy the logical and the rational. Film seems like reality but it is not reality at all, merely a complex illusion.

...I believe our audience (of Film School) understood that it is not the curriculum of a traditional film school that makes you a filmmaker, but wild fantasies and an agitation of mind over seemingly odd questions. As I said, the question about moving big boulders of stones in prehistoric times was more the starting point for Fitzcarraldo than anything else.

Werner Herzog
from Herzog on Herzog

...we must not build our work solely on individual experience and on "artistic inspiration." Tested methods, the experience of colleagues must be recognized and studied. I want to assist that process as much as I can.

Lev Kuleshov
from The Art of Cinema

Would you say that Psycho is an experimental film?

Possibly. My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider that very important. I don't care about the subject matter; I don't care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it's tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. It wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film.

Yes, that's true.

That's why I take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers, to you and me. I can't get a real appreciation of the picture in the terms we're using now. People will say, "It was a terrible film to make. The subject was horrible, the people were small, there were no characters in it." I know all of this, but I also know that the construction of the story and the way in which it was told caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional.

Yes, emotional and even physical.

Emotional. I don't care whether it looked like a small or a large picture. I didn't start off to make an important movie. I thought I could have fun with this subject and this situation. The picture cost eight hundred thousand dollars. It was an experiment in this sense: Could I make a feature film under the same conditions as a television show? I used a complete television unit to shoot it very quickly. The only place where I digressed was when I slowed down the murder scene, the cleaning-up scene, and the other scenes that indicated anything that required time. All of the rest was handled in the same way that they do it in television.

I know that you produced Psycho yourself. How did you make out with it?

Psycho cost us no more than eight hundred thousand dollars to make. It has grossed some fifteen million dollars to date.

That's fantastic! Would you say this was your greatest hit to date?

Yes. And that's what I'd like you to do - a picture that would gross millions of dollars throughout the world! It's an area of film-making in which it's more important for you to be pleased with the technique than with the content. It's the kind of picture in which the camera takes over. Of course, since critics are more concerned with the scenario, it won't necessarily get you the best notices, but you have to design your film just as Shakespeare did his plays-for an audience.

Alfred Hitchcock
from Hitchcock/Truffaut

.

No, I don't know what's ahead of me. Not at all. I don't know what I'll be doing the next day. I want spontaneity. I don't even know the day before where I'll be filming. And "set" is not the right word. The setting is always somewhere real and the objects are real. I don't bring anything special. I try not to think about what I'm going to be doing the next day.

It's no different from painting: a painter doesn't know what his next brush stroke is going to be. He doesn't know that. If a painter could... Art cannot exist without surprise or without, without, without change. If a painter knew exactly what his canvas was going to look like when he was finished, instead of painting a picture, he would paint something amorphous, vacuous, uninteresting.

I try to let ideas emerge spontaneously. Sometimes you have to wait for the ideas, but it's the only way I can work. I would get terribly bored if I knew in advance what i was going to do. Nothing is written down, even in this film [L'Argent], because there were a lot people, a lot of models, I often wouldn't know who was going to be coming. I didn't know how people would look under the lights, how I would be lighting them. So, no, I don't know anything. I don't want to. I want spontaneity, the present. It's not the past or future, it's the present, now.

Robert Bresson
from an interview with Télévision Suisse Romande (1983)

A donkey, to me, is completely uninteresting, but a human being is always interesting. (on Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar)

Do you like animals in general?

No, not very much. I have a completely natural aversion for them.

Ingmar Bergman
from an interview with John Simon, 1972

I always like to cast animals in my films, and iguanas are so stupid and bizarre I just love them...I don't know why I did it. But they are the best moments in the film [Bad Lietuenant: Port of Call New Orleans].

Werner Herzog
from a Venice Film Festival 2009 press conference

The thing is: when you're on a set, whether it's on location or in a studio - it's still a set, and you haven't got the approach, the proper approach, to a scene, you must be careful not to spook, not to get the wind up and just force things into position. The thing to do is to wait around until the idea comes, the right idea. And when it does, you'll recognize it.

John Huston
from Creativity with Bill Moyers (1982)

What happens in Western cinema is: "LOOK AT THIS! You're so stupid, you don't know what we're trying to tell you! Let me tell you something!" And we say, "Hey, discover this."

Christopher Doyle
from BBC Culture Show

Noise of a door opening and shutting, noise of footsteps, etc., for the sake of rhythm.

Robert Bresson

from Notes on the Cinematographer

2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and nineteen minutes of film, there are only a little less than forty minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to "explain" a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film - and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level - but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man's destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one's being.

Stanley Kubrick

from an interview with Eric Nordern (Playboy), 1968

Do you remember in M once the child is killed? She was playing with a ball and then he buys her a balloon. Now, we see just a bush and then the ball rolls out and comes to a standstill. Immediately we know that the girl is dead and then we see the balloon flying away. This is action, in a certain way. It is not violence.

At the time when I did M, I had to show one thing—how a murderer rapes a child, right? Let us say he slits her up. Fine. Aside from the fact that it is very horrible to look at, and very tactless, it is only one way to show it and many people would look away. But if you don't show it—if you just let the audience know what happened—then every single man and woman can imagine the most horrible things, correct? And then they help me. I don't show any violence and I don't have to show them the horrible thing of how a child has been raped.

...I always thought that I never showed violence, which is wrong. Have you seen the fight in Cloak and Dagger? This fight is violent. I was very proud. Gary Cooper, who usually never made a fight—his double made the fights—he made this fight. I am, let me call myself, a liberal, which is not very correct, but let me call me that; and I hate fascists, and this was the fight of a decent man against a fascist. So, seemingly, my hatred got the better hand of me.

Fritz Lang
from an interview with Lloyd Chesley and Michael Gould, 1972

I've noticed, from my own experience, if the external, emotional construction of images in a film are based on the filmmaker's own memory, on the kinship of one's personal experience with the fabric of the film, then the film will have the power to affect those who see it. If the director follows only the superficial, literal base of the film, for example the screenplay, even if in the most convincing, realistic, and conscientious manner, the viewer will be left unaffected.

Therefore, if you're objectively incapable of influencing a viewer with his own experience, as in literature..., and you're unable to achieve that in principal, then in cinema, you should sincerely tell about your own experience. That's why even now, when all half-literate people have learned to make movies, cinema remains an art form, which only a small number of directors have actually mastered, and they can be counted with the fingers of one hand. To remold a literary work into the frames of a film means to tell your version of the literary source, filtering it through yourself.

Andrei Tarkovsky

from an interview with Naum Abramov, 1970

Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

I've always loved narration 'cause it's kind of intravenous feeding, ya know? You're getting nourishment but you can't taste it 'cause it's just slipping into your veins.

Paul Schrader
from The Rules of Film Noir

All those effects you can get from repetition (of an image, of a sound).

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

I'd rather people feel a film before understanding it. I'd rather feelings arise before intellect.

[Regarding Pickpocket:] Rather than having a story I wanted to tell, I wanted people to feel the atmosphere that surrounds a thief, that particular atmosphere, that makes people anxious and uncomfortable.

Robert Bresson
from a filmed interview regarding Pickpocket.

...the domain of cinematography* is the domain of the unsayable.

Robert Bresson
from an interview with Le Monde, March 14th, 1967

*..."cinematography" for Bresson has the special meaning of creative filmmaking which thoroughly exploits the nature of film as such. It should not be confused with the work of a cameraman.
- annotation from Notes on the Cinematographer

Imagine that we are sitting in a very ordinary room. Suddenly we are told that there is a corpse behind the door. Instantly, the room we are sitting in is completely altered. Everything in it has taken on another look. The light, the atmosphere have changed, though they are physically the same. This is because we have changed and the objects are as we conceive them. This is the effect I wanted to produce in Vampyr.

Carl Th. Dreyer
from [unknown]

I know one thing: to make something hot, it must be done coolly. Your approach must be cool for the result to be hot. This "coldness" I've been accused of is a completely arbitrary judgment, because I've seen people deeply moved by my films. I believe it's not by trying to imitate life and using actors pretending to live that we can get emotion.

Robert Bresson
from Cinema: "Travelling" (Frederic Rossif, 1967)

Look, I just have a way of telling my stories that is kind of my way, but I don't ever really know what that way is when I start. There is this whole process to me when it comes to writing and even making it, but in particularly writing. There's this whole process that I'm-because I don't do it all the time, that I'm always remembering how I do what I do as I'm doing it. "Oh yes! Of course!"

...It's really easy to just take somebody else's script and find something about it that is interesting and maybe you rewrite it or maybe you work with that dude and make it come to be. But starting with a blank piece of paper and a pen, that's starting from square one. You get no gold stars for anything you've ever done before 'cause you are starting from square one all over again. You're at the bottom of the mountain and you've gotta climb to the top...

...I get a thrill when I just keep having these little epiphanies of "Oh yes, okay, yeah, alright. I shouldn't have worried about that because this is how I do it." And, you know, it's like I'm remembering who I am, you know, through the process. And I think that actually is part of the writing process.

Quentin Tarantino
from myspace Artist on Artist with Eli Roth (2009)

When I watch this film (Repulsion) today, I realize that I didn't really progress much in directing actors. It's just question of giving them the right ideas and then they pick it up. I really learned most of it watching movies; watching movies at the film school where we saw it day and night, three a day sometimes. Going a lot to the movies. More you see, more you become critical of the actors' performances and having started as a child actor, you know, I obviously had some kind of talent that combined with lot of movie going helped me to be able to recreate behavior which seems natural and original.

What makes acting interesting is when the reaction is authentic, real, and yet original...that's not what you actually anticipate as a reaction. ...That makes it more interesting.

Roman Polanski
from Repulsion audio commentary track

Not to shoot a film in order to illustrate a thesis, or to display men and women confined to their external aspect, but to discover the matter they are made of. To attain that "heart of the heart" which does not let itself be caught either by poetry, or by philosophy, or by drama.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

To your models: "Don't think what you're saying, don't think what you're doing." And also: "Don't think about what you say, don't think about what you do."

Radically suppress intentions in your models.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

My apprenticeship lasted five years, and I don't think many have had a better schooling. After all, it's from the daily grind of making films that you learn the craft.

Carl Th. Dreyer
from [unknown]

Tim Robbins: What makes a good movie?
Samuel Fuller: Story.

Samuel Fuller
from The Typewriter, the Rifle & the Movie Camera (1996)

For me, film allows us to reveal the least understood truths of man. It pushes on the floor of dreams or nightmares.

Werner Herzog
from Herzog on Herzog (pg. 216)

In general, I choose actors because of what they are as human beings, not because of what they can do. Terence Stamp was offended by this because I never asked him to demonstrate his acting ability. It was like stealing from him, using his reality. I had a similar experience with Anna Magnani on Mamma Roma. She also felt I was stealing from her.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

from New York Times interview (1968)

You know, we’re all here to learn from each other; we’re reflections for each other. Through Billy’s (Billy Price, Billy the Kid [2007]) experiences, I was having all these feelings, reflections on my own life. I feel the same way about casting. The people that I find, that I respond to, help tell the story of where I am in my life.

Jennifer Venditti
from an interview with Still in Motion (2007)

I've never wanted to make a conclusive statement. I've always posed various problems and left them open to consideration.

Pier Paolo Pasolini
from A Film Maker's Life (1971)

My films are about as anthropological as the music of Gesualdo and the images of Caspar David Friedrich. They are anthropological only in as much as they try to explore the human condition at this particular time on this planet. I do not make films using images only of clouds and trees, I work with human beings because the way they function in different cultural groups interests me. If that makes me an anthropologist then so be it. But I never think in terms of strict ethnography: going out to some distant island with the explicit purpose of studying the natives there. My goal is always to find out more about man himself, and film is my means. According to its nature, film does not have so much to do with reality as it does with our collective dreams. It chronicles our state of mind. The purpose is to record and guide, as chroniclers did in past centuries.

Werner Herzog
from Herzog on Herzog

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

The reason I started making films, originally, was that I would see pictures in my head. I had these visions, which I felt compelled to translate through a camera. And I guess that's as good a reason as any to start making films. Today, however, it's totally different: I don't really have pictures in my head anymore, and making films has actually become a way for me to create these images. It's not my reason for making films that has changed but my approach to making them. I still see images, but they're abstract images, as opposed to before, when they were very concrete. I don't know how it happened; I think it's just a consequence of getting older, of maturing. I guess when you are younger, filmmaking is all about ideas and ideals, but then, as you get older, you start thinking more about life and have a different approach to your work, and that's what caused the change.

In spite of that, I have to say that to me, filmmaking has always been about emotions. What I notice about the great directors I admire is that if you show me five minutes of one of their films, I will know it is theirs. And even though most of my films are very different, I think I can claim the same thing, and I think it is the emotion that ties it all together.

In any case, I never set out to make a film to express a particular idea. I understand how one could see it that way with my first films, because they can appear a little cold and mathematical, but even then, deep down, it was always about emotions for me. The reason that the films I make today might appear stronger, emotionally speaking, is just that, as a person, I think I've become a better conveyor of emotions.

Lars von Trier
from Moviemakers' Master Class by Laurent Tirard

A lot of people think documentaries are truer than fiction, and it’s not necessarily the fact. Often you have to make something up to get to the truth. It’s sort of an odd thing but I think that’s what it is.

Trent Harris
from an interview with William Becton (2001)

Art is emotion. Therefore, the use of film, I say, putting it together and making it have an effect on an audience is, I think, the main function of film. Certainly if you take dialogue in a film, truly you are only borrowing from the theatre, which is what as I have often said, most pictures you see are photographs of people talking.

...Please don't think me presumptuous if I give you, say, the analogy of, say, a painter who paints a tree, a landscape or even a bowl of fruit. I'm sure that the painter is not a bit interested in the apples for themselves alone but in the technique of his work, which stimulates the emotion of the viewer of his picture. After all, all art is experience. People look at an abstract and say, "I hate it." Well, the mere fact that they're using the word "hate" means that they're going through an experience, you see?...

Therefore, if you apply these principles to film, as I see it, it is not the pure manner of the content. In other words: it's not the story, it's what you do with it. How. And therefore, I find that with many people, they look at a film and they look at its content only and never seem to study (I'm talking about the critical faculty) what was there in the film to make an audience go through these various emotions that you put them through, especially in my field which is thrill or suspense or what have you.

Sometimes one can almost say that the man who builds a roller coaster is an artist because the grades and dives as he puts into it create the crudest and broadest emotions in the rider.

Alfred Hitchcock
from Telescope: An Interview with Fletcher Markle

Very often you find a deeper truth by fabrication. It's not that just following the surface events will ever give you access to truth. It comes through imagination. It comes through other things. It's very strange and very elusive and one of the major questions that, of course, everyone will encounter who makes films. Sooner or later you will come across this question.

Werner Herzog
from Cobra Verde audio commentary

Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

One of the things I think I said in (an) interview was that I thought Ionesco’s essays about playwriting were really essays about film editing. I remember that it was comforting to me that some of the things that he wrote about how he constructed his plays were precisely elaborations about the issues I was confronted with in editing the movies. And the experience of being at the place and shooting the film, rather than trying to figure out in advance what the themes were to be. The associational issues that he dealt with as he was writing plays just spoke to me.

It was technical issues of construction, and a relationship between how he was constructing his plays and the way I was trying to construct my movies. It didn’t, say, solve a problem in the editing of Welfare, but it made me comfortable with the way I was proceeding to try and solve the problems, knowing that somebody I admired was dealing with similar problems. It was like having a good conversation with a more experienced person about issues that concern me.

I don’t even particularly want to summarize (one of my films) because if I could summarize it in 25 words or less I shouldn’t have made the movie. But it’s the idea of creating a feeling that the sum of the parts adds up to more than the specific encounters.

Frederick Wiseman
from an interview with Nicolas Rapold (2008)

An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a color by contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematography

It's not only my dreams. My belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. And the only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about. It's as simple as that. And I make films because I have not learned anything else. And I know that I can do it to a certain degree. And it is my duty, because this might be the inner-chronicle of what we are. And we have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

Werner Herzog
from Burden of Dreams

...shooting on location is fantastic because when you go into someone's real house, you can't believe it, what they've got in these houses and it gives you so many ideas.

David Lynch
from archival interview footage

...storytelling...is good enough for a film. When I sit down to write a script I never attempt to articulate my ideas in abstract terms through the veil of an ideology. My films come to me very much alive, like dreams without logical patterns or academic explanations. I will have a basic idea for a film and then over a period of time, when maybe I am driving or walking, it becomes clearer and clearer to me. I see the film before me, as if I were in a cinema. Soon it is so perfectly transparent that I can sit and write it all down. It is as if I were copying from a movie screen. I like to write fast because it gives the story a certain urgency. I leave out all unnecessary things and just go for it. A story written this way will have, for me at least, much more coherence and drive. And it will also be full of life. For these reasons it has never taken me longer than four or five days to write a script. I just sit in front of the typewriter or computer and pound the keys.

Whether I have an ideology is not something that I have ever given much thought to, though I do understand where the question might come from. People generally sense I am very well-oriented and know where I have come from, where I am standing now and where I am going. But it is not an ideology as most people think of the term. It is just that I understand the world in my own way and am capable of articulating this understanding into stories and images that seem to be coherent to others. Even after watching my films, it bothers some people that they still cannot put their finger on what my ideology might be. Please, take what I am saying with a pair of pliers, but let me tell you: ideology is simply the films themselves and my ability to make them. This is what scares those people who try so hard to analyze and criticize me and my work.

I have often spoke of what I call the inadequate imagery of today's civilzation. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines, or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious image the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here. The biggest danger, in my opinion, is television because to a certain degree it ruins our vision and makes us very sad and lonesome. Our grandchildren will blame us for not having tossed hand-grenades into TV stations because of commercials. Television kills our imagination and what we end up with are worn-out images because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.

...I have said this before and I will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adqequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. ...We need images in accordance with our civilization and our innermost conditioning, and this is the reason why I like any film that searches for new images no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. One must dig like an archaeologist and search our violated landscape to find anything new. It can sometimes be a struggle to find unprocessed and fresh images.

Werner Herzog
from Herzog on Herzog

Not have the soul of an executant (of my own projects). Find, for each shot, a new pungency over and above what I had imagined. Invention (re-invention) on the spot.

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematography