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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)

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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)

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(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.

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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)

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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)

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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]

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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)

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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)

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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."

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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

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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)

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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)

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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

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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

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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)

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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)

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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