Opinions on Filmmaking

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2011-07-10T12:49:00.005-05:00

Love is for me the supreme demonstration of mutual understanding, something that the representation of of the sexual act can't express. In that case why not go film bulls atop cows out in the fields? Today everybody thinks it's censorship if one doesn't see "love" on the screen. In reality this isn't love being shown but sex. The sexual act act is for every one, for every couple, something unique. When it is put into films, it's the inverse.

Andrei Tarkovsky
from an interview with Charles H. De Brantes, 1986

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2010-08-21T13:44:00.003-05:00

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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2010-08-03T13:11:00.004-05:00

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

2010-07-26T13:20:00.003-05:00

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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2010-07-26T12:56:00.002-05:00

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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2010-07-26T12:47:00.004-05:00

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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2010-03-02T17:39:00.003-06:00

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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2010-02-23T16:54:00.004-06:00

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)

2010-02-18T06:42:00.004-06:00

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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2010-02-17T03:41:00.003-06:00

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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2010-02-10T21:01:00.004-06:00

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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2010-02-10T20:24:00.003-06:00

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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2010-02-02T11:57:00.004-06:00

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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2010-01-27T21:12:00.006-06:00

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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2010-01-25T21:21:00.001-06:00

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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2010-01-25T13:05:00.005-06:00

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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2010-01-24T21:59:00.003-06:00

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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2010-01-24T21:53:00.003-06:00

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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2010-01-12T15:45:00.002-06:00

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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2010-01-12T15:25:00.003-06:00

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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2010-01-11T23:12:00.004-06:00

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)

2010-01-11T18:53:00.005-06:00

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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2010-01-08T12:41:00.002-06:00

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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2010-01-06T23:05:00.003-06:00

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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2010-01-02T21:57:00.003-06:00

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

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2009-12-28T11:51:00.002-06:00

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

2009-11-28T21:24:00.002-06:00

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

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2009-11-25T22:21:00.002-06:00

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)

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2009-11-23T20:35:00.003-06:00

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

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2009-11-20T13:58:00.004-06:00

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

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2009-11-18T23:55:00.003-06:00

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)

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2009-11-17T16:40:00.002-06:00

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

Robert Bresson

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2009-11-17T14:33:00.002-06:00

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)

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2009-11-16T02:33:00.003-06:00

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

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2009-11-12T19:44:00.002-06:00

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

2009-11-11T20:12:00.004-06:00

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

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2009-11-11T20:11:00.002-06:00

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)

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2009-11-11T16:40:00.002-06:00

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)

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2009-11-10T20:09:00.003-06:00

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

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2009-11-09T11:13:00.003-06:00

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)

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2009-11-08T14:01:00.002-06:00

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)

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2009-11-07T19:01:00.002-06:00

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)

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2009-11-04T02:22:00.003-06:00

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]

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2009-10-31T13:15:00.002-05:00

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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2009-10-30T14:25:00.005-05:00

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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2009-10-30T12:28:00.003-05:00

(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)

2009-10-27T22:39:00.003-05:00

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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2009-10-26T22:32:00.001-05:00

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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2009-10-25T13:44:00.001-05:00

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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2009-10-22T15:28:00.006-05:00

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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2009-10-22T11:03:00.002-05:00

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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2009-10-22T00:53:00.001-05:00

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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2009-10-21T11:59:00.009-05:00

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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2009-10-21T01:08:00.002-05:00

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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2009-10-19T01:14:00.008-05:00

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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2009-10-11T14:40:00.002-05:00

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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2009-10-07T23:59:00.002-05:00

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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2009-10-07T12:10:00.004-05:00

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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2009-10-06T01:25:00.005-05:00

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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2009-10-04T13:43:00.002-05:00

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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2009-10-03T20:45:00.003-05:00

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

2009-10-02T21:54:00.003-05:00

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

2009-09-30T23:44:00.003-05:00

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)

2009-09-28T02:06:00.003-05:00

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

2009-09-24T20:55:00.004-05:00

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

2009-09-23T07:30:00.003-05:00

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

2009-09-22T17:11:00.004-05:00

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)

2009-09-22T00:50:00.008-05:00

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

2009-09-19T10:42:00.003-05:00

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

2009-09-17T17:29:00.006-05:00

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

2009-09-17T02:27:00.005-05:00

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

2009-09-16T00:39:00.002-05:00

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

Paul Schrader
from Filmaka inspiration quote

2009-09-15T11:48:00.003-05:00

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

2009-09-14T01:20:00.004-05:00

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

2009-09-10T02:24:00.004-05:00

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

2009-09-08T20:58:00.005-05:00

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

2009-09-08T10:13:00.003-05:00

...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

2009-09-07T21:29:00.005-05:00

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

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2009-09-06T15:28:00.004-05:00

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)

2009-09-05T15:12:00.005-05:00

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

2009-09-05T15:03:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-05T00:51:00.002-05:00

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)

2009-09-04T18:45:00.003-05:00

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

2009-09-03T00:54:00.002-05:00

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

Robert Bresson

from Notes on the Cinematographer

2009-09-01T11:19:00.004-05:00

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

2009-08-29T12:07:00.011-05:00

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

2009-08-29T00:16:00.004-05:00

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

2009-08-28T02:25:00.001-05:00

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

2009-08-27T08:17:00.006-05:00

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

2009-08-26T00:04:00.003-05:00

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

Robert Bresson
from Notes on the Cinematographer

2009-08-25T12:34:00.006-05:00

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.

2009-08-24T02:16:00.007-05:00

...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

2009-08-19T03:47:00.001-05:00

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]

2009-08-19T03:06:00.005-05:00

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)

2009-08-16T23:20:00.005-05:00

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)

2009-08-15T21:05:00.003-05:00

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

2009-08-14T22:14:00.001-05:00

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

2009-08-13T05:24:00.004-05:00

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

2009-08-12T02:24:00.001-05:00

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]

2009-08-11T04:04:00.001-05:00

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

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