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

Victor Erice

from an interview with BFI, 2003

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

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

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

Ingmar Bergman

from Ingmar Bermgan Makes a Movie (1963)

interview with Vilgot Sjöman

Back

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

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

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

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

Robert Bresson

from an interview with Ian Cameron (1962)

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

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

Robert Bresson

from an interview with Ian Cameron (1962)

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

William Faulkner

from an interview with The Paris Review, 1956

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When you look at Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese, they are obsessed by viewing films. They see one film after the other. And it's the joy of their lives and their points of reference. In my case, it's kind of different. I see maybe three or four films a year. Probably less than the average moviegoer.

I love movies, but it's odd that some of the great highlights of film history I've never seen. I've never seen Gone With the Wind, I've never seen Metropolis.

Werner Herzog

from an article in The Wall Street Journal (read full)

JAY LENO: Now the movie (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me) was very loud, I noticed. It seemed louder than normal.

LYNCH: It's important that a film is loud, and I hope many people agree. You should be inside of a film when you go into a theatre, it shouldn't be way up in front of you and it should surround you, envelop you so you can live inside a dream. And that's the way it should be, in my opinion.

David Lynch

from an interview with Jay Leno (1992)

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GODARD: And if you could replace all the images by sounds? I mean...I am thinking of a kind of inversion of the functions of the image and of the sound. One could have the images, of course, but it would be the sound that would be the significant element.

BRESSON: As to that, it is true that the ear is much more creative than the eye. The eye is lazy; the ear, on the contrary, invents. In any case, it is much more attentive, while the eye is content to receive-except in the rare cases when it invents, but then in fantasy. The ear is a much deeper sense, and very evocative. The whistle of a locomotive, for example, can evoke, imprint in you the vision of an entire railroad station, sometimes of a specific station that you know, sometimes of the atmosphere of a station, or of a railroad track, with a train stopped....The possible evoications are innumberable. What is good, too, with sound is that leaves the spectator free. And it is towards that that we should tend - to leave the spectator as free as possible.

Jean-Luc Godard & Robert Bresson

from an interview in Cahiers du cinema, 1967

as translated in Robert Bresson [ed. James Quandt]

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I don't really have contempt for the word. I have contempt when the word is used as the glue of something, ya know, which is happened in theatre and a lot in film. I really don't like it, that the word...that one has to sit and listen to words all the time when really, all the other faculties are not being used. That I really don't like. I mean, I think the word has its own beauty and also should have its own integrity, stand alone just as much as any of the other elements...

Meredith Monk

from Four American Composers (Peter Greenaway, 1983)

Note: In addition to being a modern composer, Monk is also a filmmaker.

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Little plots and stories, acted out and screened, can't possibly be called cinema. They have nothing whatever to do with cinema. A cinematographic work is above all a work which would not be possible in any other art form. In other words, it can be created by means of cinema, and cinema alone.

Andrei Tarkovsky

from Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986 (01.23.1973)

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SS: I've tried as I've gone on in my career to never, if possible, tell an actor what to think. I've become much more convinced that it's much better to tell them something to do.

LK: Yeah, I agree. Or a situation that they're in.

SS: Yeah, but never to get into, sort of the psychology of it. Something physical to give them is always good.

LK: When you get a good performance, it's a real synergy between the director and the actor. And it's almost like a chemical reaction on some level. But I think that the more I make films, the more I just try to keep it simple and too the point and not over talk stuff and not over analyze it and just present it and create a framework where people can do their own work but where everything is clear, where the character is clear, and the choices to be made, emotional choices, are clear. And I actually spend a lot of my rehearsal time focusing on that now, and it's come to a point where I don't worry about the actual performance itself 'till the day of the shoot and that's when it's really exhilarating.

Lodge Kerrigan & Steven Soderbergh

from Criterion's Clean, Shaven audio commentary

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How vain these old men are - those Gerasimovs! How desperate they are for fame, acclaim, awards, prizes! They apparently think it's going to make them better filmmakers. They're pretty pathetic. Poor little dilettantes earning money with this and that. And highly professional with it, I may add.

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I also feel sorry for these so-called artists, poets and writers who feel that they are in no fit state to work; what they are really talking about is not working but earning.

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If a writer, despite his natural gift, gives up writing because no one will publish him, then he is no writer. The artist is distinguished by his urge to create, which by very definition is a concomitant of talent.

Andrei Tarkovsky

from Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986 (09.03.1970)

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The characters (of my films) each belong to the same kind of spiritual family: people who suffer and who radiate a radical human dignity; people who are lonely and desperate but who go beyond their limits.

Werner Herzog

from an ad in The Village Voice for a retrospective (click)

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A film is not merely the next item in your career, it is an action which will affect the whole of your life. For I had made up my mind that in this film (The Mirror), for the first time, I would use the means of cinema to talk of all that was most precious to me, and do so directly, without playing any kind of tricks.

Andrei Tarkovsky

from Sculpting in Time

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Nature is always present in my films, and it's not a question of style. It's the truth. While my father was fighting in the war, my mother would take us to the countryside every spring. She considered it her duty, and ever since then I associate nature with my mother.

A city man knows nothing about life, he doesn't feel how time passes, he doesn't know its natural flow. The child finds assurance of its future in nature, in nature he educates his will. And the circumstance of being alone allows him to have the capacity to meet other people later on. If one is only a social animal, one survives, confined to the wills of others. Unconsciously, my mother knew that nature is indespensible, and she instilled in us a peasant culture.

Andrei Tarkovsky
from an interview with Claire Devarriex (1978)

Often we remove nature from films because it seems useless. We exclude it thinking that we are the real protagonists. But we are not the protagonists, because we are dependent on nature. We are the result of its evolution. I think to neglect nature is, from an emotional and artistic point of view, a crime. Above all it is stupid, because nature always gives us the sensation of the truth.

Andrei Tarkovsky
from an interview with Tonino Guerra (1978)

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After Solaris, he (Andrei Tarkovsky) made a film called The Mirror. This is a film about his childhood memories, and many say this is too difficult to grasp. At first sight, it is a film that seems to have no linear development. But when are childhood memories ever remembered in logical sequence?

The very nature of these inexplicable links between fragmented memories holds the essence of the poetry of childhood memories. If you watch with that in mind, it is the easiest film to understand. But Tarkovsky plays dumb and says nothing. And this is what convinces me of his potential. Those who spend too much time explaining their own films don't have much of a future.

Akira Kurosawa
from an essay for the Ashai Shinbun newspaper (1977)

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I do nothing in particular to please an audience, and yet I hope fervently that my picture will be accepted and loved by those who see it.

Andrei Tarkovsky

from Sculpting in Time

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The moment a viewer understands, deciphers, all is over, finished: the illusion of the infinite becomes banality, a commonplace, a truism. The mystery disappears.

Andrei Tarkovsky

from a talk on the Apocalypse at St. Jame's Church, 1984

quoted from The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky

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At the beginning of the story (Barry Lyndon, 1975), Barry has more people around him to whom he can express his feelings. As the story progresses, and particularly after his marriage, he becomes more and more isolated. There is finally no one who loves him or with whom he can talk freely, with the possible exception of his young son, who is too young to be of much help. At the same time, I don't think that the lack of introspective dialogue scenes are any loss to the story. Barry's feelings are there to be seen as he reacts to the increasingly difficult circumstances of his life. I think this is equally true for the other characters in the story. In any event, scenes of people talking about themselves are often very dull.

Stanley Kubrick

from an interview with Michel Ciment

In memory of Eric Rohmer (1920-2010)

I think my films introduced into the world of cinema a certain content expressed either by a character monologue as in the voice-over commentary, or by a discussion. In many films, people never discuss ideas, whether moral ideas or political ideas. And if those kinds of discussions are in fact introduced, they always ring false. But I think I've managed - and this is what I'm happiest about with my films as a whole - I've managed to show people discussing morality, whatever that morality might be, in a completely natural way, whether it's a dandy's moral code in La collectionneuse, or religious questions in My Night at Maud's or issues of eroticism in Claire's Knee. They're all covered by the word "moral" in the general sense.

Eric Rohmer

from a discussion with Barbet Schroeder for Criterion

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The strong sensation of nature - and with me certainly it is keen - is the necessary basis for any conception of art, and on it rest the grandeur and beauty of the work to be. The knowledge of the means of expressing our emotion is no less essential, and can only be acquired by very long experience.

Paul Cézanne
quoted in Art of the 20th Century

As I had done for the Flannery O'Connor quote some months ago, I feel obliged to step in and explain why I have chosen a quote from a painter for a blog centered around opinions on filmmaking by filmmakers. Reportedly, Bresson gave up painting because he didn't know what could be done after Cézanne and with this quote in particular I find a definite kinship of the two on the importance of nature presented sensually, that is to say nature emphasized in art rather than just being the location where the events take place. In the works of Bresson, Herzog, and Tarkovsky especially, the emphasis on nature (both its visual quality and its sounds) seems to me to be one of the major reasons the films of these masters are so effective.

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To be honest, in making my first [feature] film I had another objective: to establish whether or not I had it in me to be a director. In order to come to a definite conclusion I left the reins slack, as it were. I tried not to hold myself back. If the film turns out well, I thought, then I'll have the right to work in the cinema. Ivan's Childhood was therefore specially important. It was my qualifying examination.

All this is not to say that I made the film as a kind of unstructured exercise, merely that I tried not to hold myself back. I found myself having to rely on my own taste and have faith in the competence of my aesthetic choices. On the basis of making the film I had to establish what I could count upon in future work, and what would not stand the test.

Now, of course, I hold different views on many things. Afterwards it became clear that little of what I discovered actually had life in it, and I have since abandoned many of the conclusions I reached then.

Andrei Tarkovsky
from Sculpting in Time

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What then are are these two tendencies (of cinema)? On one side, it's "poetic cinema"...I believe I could be situated within this tendency of poetic cinema, because I don't follow a strict narrative development and logical connections. I don't like looking for justifications for the protagonist's actions. One of the reasons why I became involved in cinema is because I saw too many films that didn't correspond to what I expected from cinematic language.

On the other hand, there is what we in the USSR call the "intellectual cinema" of Mikhail Romm. In spite of the fact that for a time I was his student, I can't say anything about it because I don't understand that kind of cinema.

All art, of course, is intellectual, but for me, all the arts, and cinema even more so, must above all be emotional and act upon the heart.

Andrei Tarkovsky
from an interview with Patrick Bureau, 1962