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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