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