Directors Talk Directors

07/06/2018 Directors Talk Directors - My Criterion - The Criterion Collection
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Directors Talk Directors
Directors Talk Directors

by Peter_Wilson
Created 12/25/13
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Comments made by directors towards other directors, taken from biographies, essays, interviews, and
additional sources.
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Breathless
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Jean-Luc Godard
[On Quentin Tarantino] Tarantino named his production company after one of my films. He'd have done
better to give me some money.
[On Steven Spielberg] I don't know him personally. I don't think his films are very good.
[On Steven Spielberg] It is strange, he had no idea about the Holocaust so he went and looked elsewhere
for inspiration. When we don’t have an idea about something, we look first of all within ourselves.
One evening in Hamburg there are three people in the auditorium. The show begins. Orson Welles
comes on stage and introduces himself: author, composer, actor, designer, producer, director, scholar,
financier, gourmet, ventriloquist, poet. Then he expresses surprise that so many people have come, even
though there are so few. Doubtless The Trial proves that it isn't easy for a wonder kid to grow old
gracefully, and maybe it is to be feared that his giant wings are hindering our Shakespearian albatross
from making progress in old Europe. And yet may we be accursed if we forget for one second that he
alone with Griffith, one in silent days, one sound, managed to start up that marvellous little electric train
in which Lumière did not believe. All of us will always owe him everything.
Alain Resnais is the second greatest editor in the world after Eisenstein. Editing, to them, means
organizing cinematographically; in other words planning dramatically, composing musically, or in yet
other words, the finest, film-making.
There are several ways of making films. Like Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, who make music. Like
Sergei Eisenstein, who paints. Like Stroheim, who wrote sound novels in silent days. Like Alain
Resnais, who sculpts. And like Socrates, Rossellini I mean, who creates philosophy.
In the world of today, whatever the domain, France can now shine only through exceptional works.
Robert Bresson illustrates this rule in the cinema. He is the French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the
Russian novel and Mozart is German music.
I don't believe in the body of work. There are works, they might be produced in individual installments,
but the body of work as a collection, the great oeuvre, I have no interest in it. I prefer to speak in terms of
pathways. Along my course, there are highs and there are lows, there are attempts... I've towed the line a
lot. You know, the most difficult thing is to tell a friend that what he's done isn't very good. I can't do it.
Eric Rohmer was brave enough to tell me at the time of the Cahiers that my critique of "Strangers on a
Train" was bad. Jacques Rivette could say it too. And we paid a lot of attention to what Rivette thought.
As for François Truffaut, he didn't forgive me for thinking his films were worthless. He also suffered
from not ending up finding my films as worthless as I thought his own were.
[On the death of Kenji Mizoguchi] The greatest of Japanese filmmakers. Or, quite simply, one of the
greatest of filmmakers.
Kenji Mizoguchi was the peer of Murnau, of Rossellini. His oeuvre is enormous. Two hundred films, so
it is said. No doubt there is a good deal of legend about this, and one can be sure that future centuries
will bring quite a few Mizoguchi Monogatari. But there is also no doubt that Kenji is extraordinary, for
he can shoot films in three months that would take a Bresson two years to bring about. And Mizoguchi
brings them to perfection.
There can be no doubt that any comparison between

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GoandOCT
Kurosawa
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advantage of the former. Alone among the Japanese film-makers known to
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prestige.
If poetry is manifest in each second, each shot filmed by Mizoguchi, it is because, as with Murnau, it is
the instinctive reflection of the film-maker's creative.
Mizoguchl's art is the most complex because it is the simplest. Camera effects and tracking shots are rare,
but when they do suddenly burst into a scene, the effect is one of dazzling beauty. Each crane shot (here
Preminger is easily outstripped) has the clean and limpid line of a brush-stroke by Hokusai.
Ugetsu Monogotari is Kenji Mizoguchi’s masterpiece, and one which ranks him on equal terms with
Griffith, Eisenstein, and Renoir.
[On Kenji Mizoguchi] He is probably the only director in the world who dares to make a systematic use
of 180 degree shots and reaction shots. But what in another director would be striving for effect, with
him is simply a natural movement arising out of the importance he accords to the décor and the position
the actors occupy within it.
The art of Kenji Mizoguchi is to prove that real life is at one and the same time elsewhere, and yet here,
in its strange and radiant beauty.
In the temple of cinema, there are images, light and reality. Sergei Paradjanov was the master of that
temple.
Take a drawing by Matisse, a simple curve of a leg or a shoulder. Is there a basis, at the beginning when
he starts drawing his curve? There isn’t. This is what I’m trying to say. And that’s what comprises the
originality of Max Ophuls, which he acquired a little bit at a time, because in Liebelei, in Letter from an
Unknown Woman, in his American films, it’s not there. It’s a freedom that is earned and that is found,
that isn’t applied. On a basic level, it’s neither better nor worse as a way of making a film. But there’s
something extremely original that we found so satisfying back in the day and that continues to satisfy me
now … There’s a kind of pure cinema of that era – you might even call it experimental – which has
disappeared. There’s no literature…not that there’s no text or dialogue, but there’s no pre-literature.
Cinema begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.
[On Stanley Kubrick] Began flashily by making glacial copies of Ophuls's tracking shots and Aldrich's
violence. Then became a recruit to intellectual commerce by following the international paths of glory of
another K, an older Stanley who also saw himself as Livingstone, but whose weighty sincerity turned up
trumps at Nüremberg, whereas Stanley Junior's cunning look-at-me tactics foundered in the cardboard
heroics of Spartacus without ever attaining the required heroism. So Lolita led one to expect the worst.
Surprise: it is a simple, lucid film, precisely written, which reveals America and American sex better than
either Melville or Reichenbach, and proves that Kubrick need not abandon the cinema provided he films
characters who exist instead of idea which exist only in the bottom drawers of old scriptwriters who
believe that the cinema is the seventh art.
[At the 2004 Cannes Film Festival about filmmaker Michael Moore] Post-war filmmakers gave us the
documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the
crockumentary.
There are two main groups of directors. On one side, with Eisenstein and Hitchcock, are those who
prepare their films as fully as possible. They know what they want, it's all in their heads, and they put it
down on paper. The shooting is merely practical application – constructing something as similar as
possible to what was imagined. Resnais is one of them; so is Demy.

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circular films; the others, films in a straight line. Renoir is one of the few who do both at the same time,
and this is his charm.
Rossellini is something else again. He alone has an exact vision of the totality of things. So he films them
in the only way possible. Nobody else can film one of Rossellini's scenarios - one would have to ask
questions which he himself never asks. His vision of the world is so exact that his way of seeing detail,
formal or otherwise, is too. With him, a shot is beautiful because it is right; with most others, a shot
becomes right because it is beautiful. They try to construct something wonderful, and if in fact it
becomes so, one can see that there were reasons for doing it. Rossellini does something he had a reason
for doing in the first place. It's beautiful because it is.
There is theatre (Griffith), there is poetry (Murnau) there is painting (Rossellini), there is music (Renoir),
there is dance (Eisenstein), and therefore there must be cinema; and the cinema is Nicholas Ray.
If the cinema no longer existed, Nicholas Ray alone gives the impression of being capable of reinventing
it, and, what is more, of wanting to. While it is easy to imagine John Ford as an admiral, Robert Aldrich
on Wall Street, Anthony Mann on the trail of Belliou la Fumée or Raoul Walsh as a latter-day Henry
Morgan under Caribbean skies, it is difficult to see the director of Run For Cover doing anything but
make films. A Logan or a Tashlin, for instance, might make good in the theatre or music-hall, Preminger
as a novelist, Brooks as a school teacher, Cukor in advertising - but not Nicholas Ray. Were the cinema
suddenly cease to exist, most directors would in no way be at a loss; Nicholas Ray would.
Like Orson Welles before him, Nicholas Ray left Hollywood before shooting ended, defeated, slamming
the door behind him.
...for five years, in my opinion, [Alfred Hitchcock] really was the master of the universe. More than
Hitler, more than Napoleon. He had a control of the public that no one else had. Because Hitchcock was
a poet. The public was under the control of poetry. And Hitchcock was a poet on a universal level, not
like Rilke. He was the only poet maudit to have a huge success; Rilke wasn't one, Rimbaud wasn't. And
something which is very astonishing with Hitchcock is that you don't remember what the story of
NOTORIOUS is, or why Janet Leigh is going to the Bates Motel. You remember one pair of spectacles
or a windmill -- that's what millions and millions of people remember. If you remember NOTORIOUS,
what do you remember? Wine bottles. You don't remember Ingrid Bergman. When you remember
Griffith or Welles or Eisenstein or me, you don't remember ordinary objects. He is the only one.
Throughout his entire career, Hitchcock has never used an unnecessary shot.
Before the war, the film director was not comparable to a musician or a writer, but to a carpenter, a
craftsman. It so happened that among the craftsmen there were artists like Renoir and Ophuls. Today the
director is considered as an artist, but most of them are still craftsmen. They work in the cinema as one
does in a skilled trade. Craftsmanship does exist, but not as they see it. Carné is a craftsman, and his craft
makes him make bad films. To begin with, when he was creating his craft, he made brilliant films: now
he creates no longer. Today Chabrol has more craft than Carné, and his craft serves for exploration. It is a
worthy craft.
Dreyer, Antonioni, Rivette, Rohmer, Marker, Bresson do not and never will make anything but the film
they want to make.
[On Jacques Tati] He sees problems where there are none, and finds them. He is capable of filming a
beach scene simply to show that the children building a sandcastle drown the sound of the waves with
their cries. He will also shoot a scene just because at that moment a window is opening in a house away
in the background, and a window opening - well, that's funny.Go

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nothing. Blades of grass, a kite, children, a little old man, anything, everything which it at once real,
19 May bizarre and
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2015 2016a feeling
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conversation with him is impossible. He is par excellence, an anti-theoretician. His films are good in spite
of his ideas. Made by anyone else, Jour de fête and Hulot would be nothing. Having become with these
two films the best French director of comedy since Max Linder, Jacques Tati may with his third film
Mon Oncle, become quite simply the best.
[in Paris, 10/18/66] Until I am paid on par with [Henri-Georges Clouzot, [Federico Fellini and ['Rene
Clément'], I cannot consider myself to be a success.
When Allen, De Palma, Scorsese, and Tarantino echo shots or sequences from other filmmakers, the
gesture is always one of postmodernist appropriation, not one of critical transformation, and the same
thing can be said about the homages of (among others) Truffaut and Bertolucci. But when Rivette
literally quotes the "Tower of Babel" sequence from METROPOLIS in PARIS BELONGS TO US,
thereby criticizing the metaphysical presuppositions of his characters, or when Resnais virtually
duplicates a sequence of shots from GILDA inside Delphine Seyrig's room in LAST YEAR AT
MARIENBAD, thereby locating the romantic mystifications of Alain Robbe-Grillet within the even
larger romantic mystifications of Hollywood, a certain kind of critical commentary is taking place. The
same process is at work on a much more elaborate scale in CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING,
when Rivette applies the critical discoveries of doubling in Hitchcock to the "double" structure of his
own film, doubling shots as well as scenes. But the same thing obviously can't be said for Woody Allen
and De Palma appropriating the baby carriage from POTEMKIN in BANANAS and THE
UNTOUCHABLES or for Tarantino getting Uma Thurman in PULP FICTION to imitate Anna
Karina's dance around a pool table in VIVRE SA VIE.
Criticism taught us to admire both Rouch and Eisenstein. From it we learned not to deny one aspect of
the cinema in favor of another.
Rouch's originality lies in having made characters out of his actors – who are actors in the simplest sense
of term, moreover, being filmed in action, while he contents himself with filming this action after having,
as far as possible, organized it logically in the manner of Rossellini.
[On Billy Wilder] After a seven year itch, he decided no longer to be tongue-in-cheek about tragedy but,
quite the contrary, to take comedy seriously. In doing so took he took out a double indemnity for
cinematographic survival, and success followed quickly. Even as he threw all the great human values to
the wolves, he became one of the new great of Hollywood; and even as he replaced Wyler and
Zinnemann in the hearts of the exhibitors, he established himself as a worthy heir to Lubitsch in the
hearts of cinephiles, for he had rediscovered the Berlin jester's soul of Billy the Kid, and malice served
him henceforth, as tenderness, irony as technical know-how. After Ariane and Marilyn, and in spite of
One, Two, Three false steps, Irma la Douce, thanks to the keenness and delicacy of it's Panavision,
thanks to the limpidity of the acting of Jack and Shirley, thanks to the delicacy of the colours of LaShelle
and Trauner, sweet Irma, as I say, sets a wonderful seal on a twin ascension to box-office and to art. The
outcome: a combination of qualities peculiarly sufficient to turn a gentleman-in-waiting into a film-maker
arrived.
We were the first directors to know that Griffith exists. Even Carné, Delluc, and René Clair, when they
made their first films, had no real critical or historical background. Even Renoir had very little; but then
of course he had genius.
[On Charlie Chaplin] He is beyond praise because he is the greatest of all. What else can one say? The
only filmmaker, anyway, to whom one can apply without misunderstanding that very misleading
adjective, ‘humane’. From the invention of the sequence shot in The Champion to that of cinéma-vérité
in the final speech of The Great Dictator, Charles Spencer Chaplin,

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remaining
MAY marginal to the rest
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of cinema, ended up by filling this margin with things (what other word can
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19 May 2014 - 7 Apr 2016 honour, beauty, movement?) than all the other directors together
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book. Today one says Chaplin as one says Da Vinci—or rather Charlie, like Leonardo.
John Cassavetes, who was more or less my age, now he was a great director. I can’t imagine myself as
his equal in cinema. For me he represents a certain cinema that’s way up above.
[On Georges Franju] He seeks the bizarre at all costs, because the bizarre is a convention and behind this
convention one must, also at all costs, discover a basic truth. He seeks the madness behind reality
because it is for him the only way to rediscover the true face of reality behind this madness. This is why
with each close-up one has the feeling that the camera wipes these faces, as Veronica's handkerchief
wiped the face of Our Lord, becauce Franju seeks and finds classicism behind romanticism. In more
modern terms, let us say that Franju demonstrates the necessity of surrealism if one considers it as a
pilgrimage to the sources.
[On Roger Leenhardt] The most subtle film theoretician in France. He hates paradoxes, but creates them.
He hates false arguments, but offers them. He hates the cinema, but loves it. He doesn’t like good films,
but makes them.
The following is excerpts taken from BERGMANORAMA , which was originally published in Cahiers
du Cinéma, July 1958
In singing the praises of Welles, Ophüls, Dreyer, Hawks, Cukor, even Vadim, all one need say is, 'It's
cinema.' And if we conjure the names of the great artists of past centuries for purposes of comparison,
we have no need to say more.
The cinema is not a craft. It is an art. It does not mean team-work. One is always alone; on the set as
before the blank page. And for Bergman, to be alone means to ask questions. And to make films means
to answer them. Nothing could be more classically romantic.
Of all contemporary directors, admittedly, he alone has not openly rejected those devices beloved of the
avant-gardists of the thirties which can still be seen dragging wearily on in every festival of amateur or
experimental films. But this is audacity rather than anything else on the part of the director of Thirst: for
Bergman, well aware of what he is doing, uses this bric-a-brac in a different context. In the Bergman
aesthetic, those shots of lakes, forests, grass, clouds, the deliberately unusual camera angles, the
elaborately careful back-lighting, are no longer mere showing-off or technical trickery: on the contrary,
they are integrated into the psychology of the characters at the precise instant when Bergman wants to
evoke an equally precise feeling: for instance, Monika's pleasure is conveyed in her journey by boat
through an awakening Stockholm, and her weariness by reversing the journey through a Stockholm
settling down to sleep.
At the precise instant. Bergman, in effect, is the film-maker of the instant. Each of his films is born of the
hero's reflection on the present moment, and deepens that reflection by a sort of dislocation of time–
rather in the manner of Proust but more powerfully, as though Proust were multiplied by both Joyce and
Rousseau–to become a vast, limitless meditation upon the instantaneous. An Ingmar Bergman film is, if
you like, one twenty-fourth of a second metamorphosed and expanded over an hour and a half. It is the
world between two blinks of the eyelids, the sadness between two heart-beats, the gaiety between two
handclaps.
Employed almost systematically by Bergman in most of his films, the flashback ceases to be what Orson
Welles called one of those 'poor tricks' to become, if not the theme of the film, at least its sine qua non. In
addition, this figure of style, even if employed as such, acquires the enormous advantage that it
considerably enriches the scenario since it constitutes its internal rhythm and dramatic framework. One
need only have seen any one of Bergman's films to realize thatGo
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flashback
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in the right place; in two right places, I should say, because the remarkable
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other words a renewal of the action – which is an attribute of the truly great. What one mistook for
facility was simply a greater rigour. Ingmar Bergman, the intuitive artist decried by the 'craftsmen', here
gives a lesson to the best of our scriptwriters. Not for the first time, as we shall see.
When Vadim emerged, we praised him for being up to date when most of his colleagues were one war
behind. Similarly, when we saw Giulietta Masina's poetic grimacing, we praised Fellini, who's baroque
freshness had the sweet smell of renewal. But this renaissance of the modern cinema had already been
brought to it's peak five years earlier by the son of a Swedish pastor. What were we dreaming of when
Summer with Monika was first shown in Paris? Ingmar Bergman was already doing what we are still
accusing French directors of not doing.
Wishing won't make just anyone a goldsmith. Nor will trumpeting from the rooftops mean that one is in
advance of everyone else. A genuinely original auteur is one who never deposits his scripts with the
homonymous society. Because that which is precise, Bergman proves, will be new, and that which is
profound will be precise. But the profound novelty of Summer With Monika, Thirst or The Seventh Seal
is first and foremost their wonderfully precise tone. A spade is a spade for Bergman, certainly, but so it is
for many others, and is of little consequence. The important thing is that Bergman, blessed with a
foolproof moral elegance, can adapt himself to any truth, even the most scabrous (cf. the last sketch in
Waiting Women). That which is unpredictable is profound, and a new Bergman film frequently
confounds the warmest partisans of the preceding one. One expects a comedy, and along comes a
medieval mystery. Often their only common ground is the incredible scope of their situations, more than
a match for Feydeau, just as the dialogue is more than a match for Montherlant in veracity and, supreme
paradox, Giraudoux in delicacy. It goes without saying that this sovereign ease in building a script is
accompanied, when the camera starts to turn, by an absolute mastery in the direction of actors. In this
field Bergman is the peer of a Cukor or a Renoir. Admittedly most of his actors, many of whom also
work with him in the theatre, are remarkably talented. I am thinking in particular of Maj-Britt Nilsson,
whose stubborn chin and sulky contempt are not without a touch of Ingrid Bergman. But one has to have
seen Birger Malmsten as the dreamy boy in Summer Interlude, and again, unrecognizably, as the
respectable bourgeois in Thirst; one has to have seen Gunnar Björnstrand and Harriet Andersson in the
first episode of Journey into Autumn, and again, with different eyes, different mannerisms, different
body rhythms, in Smiles of a Summer Night, to realize the extent of Bergman's amazing ability to mould
these cattle, as Hitchcock called them.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of film-makers. Those who walk along the streets with their heads
down, and those who walk with their heads up. In order to see what is going on around them, the former
are obliged to raise their heads suddenly and often, turning to the left and then the right, embracing the
field of vision in a series of glances. They see. The latter see nothing, they look, fixing their attention on
the precise point which interests them. When the former are shooting a film, their framing is roomy and
fluid (Rossellini), whereas with the latter it is narrowed down to the last millimetre (Hitchcock). With the
former (Welles), one finds a script construction which may be loose but is remarkably open to the
temptations of chance; with the latter (Lang), camera movements not only of incredible precision in the
set but possessing their own abstract value as movements in space. Bergman, on the whole, belongs to
the first group, to the cinema of freedom; Visconti to the second, the cinema of rigour.
Should anyone still doubt that Bergman, more than any other European film-maker, Renoir excepted, is
its most typical representative, Prison offers, if not proof, at least a very clear symbol. It tells, as you
know, of a director who is offered a story about the Devil by his mathematics professor. Yet it is not he,
but the writer he has commissioned to write a script who suffers all the diabolical misfortunes.
As a man of the theatre, Bergman is willing to direct plays

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would deny that The Seventh Seal is less skilfully directed than White Nights, its compositions less
precise, its angles less rigorous; but–and herein lies the essential difference–for a man so enormously
talented as Visconti, making a very good film is ultimately a matter of very good taste. He is sure of
making no mistakes, and to a certain extent it is easy. It is easy to choose the prettiest curtains, the most
perfect furniture, to make the only possible camera movements, if one knows one is gifted that way. For
an artist, to know oneself too well is to yield a little to facility.
Seven Samurai
Akira Kurosawa
[On Mikio Naruse] Naruse's Method consists of staging one very brief shot after another; but when we
look at them placed end-to-end in the finished film, they give the impression of one long single take. The
fluidity is so perfect that the cuts are invisible . . . A flow of shots that looks calm and ordinary at first
glance reveals itself to be like a deep river with a quiet surface disguising a fast-raging current.
[On Mikio Naruse] He was a truly severe person. When he, e.g., didn't like an actor's performance, he
said simply "No" and nothing more, sat silent. It was hard for the actor, of course, because he or she
must think all by him-/herself and try various performances by himself. I, compared with him, am not
earnest enuogh - I cannot help giving instructions to actors and cann't let them think by themselves...
Thus, actors disciplined by Mr. Ozu, Mr. Naruse and/or Mr. Mizoguchi were all really competent and
could by themselves play rightly even if I said nothing.
[On Kenji Mizoguchi] The Japanese director I admire the most.
[On Kenji Mizoguchi] Of all Japanese directors I have the greatest respect for him. . . . With the death of
Mizoguchi, Japanese film lost its truest creator.
[On Kenji Mizoguchi] Now that Mizoguchi is gone, there are very few directors who can see the past
clearly and realistically.
The great thing about Mizoguchi was his tireless effort to imbue every scene with reality.
I am often accused of being too exacting with sets and properties, of having things made, just for the
sake of authenticity, that will never appear on camera. Even if I don’t request this, my crew does it for
me anyway. The first Japanese director to demand authentic sets and props was Mizoguchi Kenji, and
the sets in his films are truly superb. I learned a great deal about filmmaking from him, and the making of
sets is among the most important. The quality of the set influences the quality of the actors’
performances. If the plan of a house and the design of the rooms are done properly, the actors can move
about in them naturally. If I have to tell an actor, ‘Don’t think about where this room is in relation to the
rest of the house,’ that natural ease cannot be achieved. For this reason, I have the sets made exactly like
the real thing. It restricts the shooting, but encourages that feeling of authenticity.
[On Yasujiro Ozu] His characteristic camera work was imitated by many dirctors abroads as well, i.e.,
many people saw and see Mr. Ozu's movies, right? That's good. Indeed, one can learn pretty much from
his movies. Young prospective movie makers in Japan should, I hope, see more of Ozu's work. Ah, it
was really good times when Mr. Ozu, Mr. Naruse and/or Mr. Mizoguchi were all making movies!.
[On Roberto Rossellini] He's one of the most important representatives

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Italian Realism.
MAY But
👤 also
representatives of Nouvelle Vague, Godard and/or Truffaut, e.g., made a model
18 captures 07 of him. Did you know
19 May it?
2014His way
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benefited
2016by2017
his work.
[On Ishirô Honda and Godzilla] Mr. Honda is really an ernest, nice fellow. Imagine, e.g., what you
would do if a monster like Godzilla emerges! Normally one would forget and abandon his duty and
simply flee! You won't? But the personel in this movie properly and sincerely lead people, don't they?
That is typical of Mr. Honda. I love it. Well, he was my best friend. As you know, I am a pretty obstinate
and demanding person. Thus, that I had never problems with him was due to HIS good personality.
[On Satyajit Ray] The quiet but deep observation, understanding and love of the human race, which are
characteristic of all his films, have impressed me greatly. … I feel that he is a giant of the movie industry.
… Not to have seen the cinema of Satyajit Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the
moon.
[On Satyajit Ray and Abbas Kiarostami] Words cannot describe my feelings about them ... When
Satyajit Ray passed on, I was very depressed. But after seeing Kiarostami's films, I thanked God for
giving us just the right person to take his place.
[On Federico Fellini] Fellini's cinematgraphic art is excellent. It's in itself 'fine art'. Nowadays no one has
such a peculiar talent more... One feels in his movies, say, an existential power, which has a strong
impact. Well, I met him several times, but he was so shy that he didn't talk about his movies to me.
[On Martin Scorsese] Scorsese is, of course, a very good director and actor, but he is above all a
wonderful person. He's energetically wrestling with various matters, e.g., how films, especially colour
films could be kept undameged, he also looks after retired movie makers. He is, so to speak, a bundle of
energy. The Japanese movie industry also would need such a person, I think.
[On Nagisa Oshima and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence] With Mr. Oshima I discussed many issues,
e.g., the issue of film directors' associations. Many people say that he is impatient or so, but he really is a
very consistant, earnest person. 'I rely on you to develop Japanese movies', I said him several times when
we dined together. This picture must have been a very hard work, for he's a person who cannot save
work at all. The cast is also pretty interesting. A really skilled film maker he is!
John Ford is really great…. When I’m old, that’s the kind of director I want to be.
I have respected John Ford from the beginning. Needless to say, I pay close attention to his productions,
and I think I am influenced by them.
[On Luchino Visconti] Visconti is a true blue blood. Whether because he was raised in such an
environment or simply because of his blue-blood birth, he had a touch that none but he can have. I met
him several times, but he was a hardly approachable person. If someone, e.g., during the shooting came
in, he, I've heard, shouts at him in an aristocratic posture "leave from here!". He is a very severe person,
I've heard.
[On Theodoros Angelopoulos] He's a wonderful person. What he says makes one feel as if one's deepst
soul is looked into by him. A true mature adult one could call him.
[The following is an excerpt of Kurosawa discussing Tarkovsky and Solaris]
I met Tarkovsky for the first time when I attended my welcome luncheon at the Mosfilm during my first
visit to Soviet Russia. He was small, thin, looked a little frail, and at the same time exceptionally
intelligent, and unusually shrewd and sensitive. I thought he somehow resembled Toru Takemitsu, but I
don't know why. Then he excused himself saying, "I still have work to do," and disappeared, and after a
while I heard such a big explosion as to make all the

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Seeing me taken aback, the boss of the Mosfilm said with a meaningful smile:
18 captures 07 "You know another world
19 May war
2014 - does not break out. Tarkovsky just launched a rocket. This work
7 Apr 2016 with2016
2015 Tarkovsky,
2017 however, has
proved a Great War for me." That was the way I knew Tarkovsky was shooting Solaris.
After the luncheon party, I visited his set for Solaris. There it was. I saw a burnt down rocket was there at
the corner of the space station set. I am sorry I forgot to ask him as to how he had shot the launching of
the rocket on the set. The set of the satellite base was beautifully made at a huge cost, for it was all made
up of thick duralumin.
It glittered in its cold metallic silver light, and I found light rays of red, or blue or green delicately
winking or waving from electric light bulbs buried in the gagues on the equipment lined up in there. And
above on the ceiling of the corridor ran two duralumin rails from which hanged a small wheel of a
camera which could move around freely inside the satellite base.
Tarkovsky guided me around the set, explaining to me as cheerfully as a young boy who is given a
golden opportunity to show someone his favorite toybox. Bondarchuk, who came with me, asked him
about the cost of the set, and left his eyes wide open when Tarkovsky answered it. The cost was so huge:
about six hundred million yen as to make Bondarchuk, who directed that grand spectacle of a movie
"War and Peace," agape in wonder.
Now I came to fully realize why the boss of the Mosfilm said it was "a Great War for me." But it takes a
huge talent and effort to spend such a huge cost. Thinking "This is a tremendous task" I closely gazed at
his back when he was leading me around the set in enthusiasm.
Concerning Solaris, I find many people complaining that it is too long, but I do not think so. They
especially find too lengthy the description of nature in the introductory scenes, but these layers of
memory of farewell to this earthly nature submerge themselves deep below the bottom of the story after
the main character has been sent in a rocket into the satellite station base in the universe, and they almost
torture the soul of the viewer like a kind of irresistible nostalghia toward mother earth nature, which
resembles homesickness. Without the presence of beautiful nature sequences on earth as a long
introduction, you could not make the audience directly conceive the sense of having-no-way-out
harboured by the people "jailed" inside the satellite base.
I saw this film late at night in a preview room in Moscow for the first time, and soon I felt my heart
aching in agony with a longing to returning to the earth as quickly as possible. Marvellous progress in
science we have been enjoying, but where will it lead humanity after all? Sheer fearful emotion this film
succeeds in conjuring up in our soul. Without it, a science fiction movie would be nothing more than a
petty fancy.
These thoughts came and went while I was gazing at the screen.
Tarkovsky was together with me then. He was at the corner of the studio. When the film was over, he
stood up, looking at me as if he felt timid. I said to him, "Very good. It makes me feel real fear."
Tarkovsky smiled shyly, but happily. And we toasted vodka at the restaurant in the Film Institute.
Tarkovsky, who didn't drink usually, drank a lot of vodka, and went so far as to turn off the speaker from
which music had floated into the restaurant, and began to sing the theme of samurai from Seven Samurai
at the top of his voice.
As if to rival him, I joined in.
For I was at that moment very happy to find myself living on Earth.
Solaris makes a viewer feel this, and even this single fact shows us that Solaris is no ordinary SF film. It
truly somehow provokes pure horror in our soul. And it is under the total grip of the deep insights of
Tarkovsky.
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There must be many, many things still unknown to humanity in this2015 world:
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which a man had to look into, strange visitors in the satellite base, time running in reverse, from death to
life, strangely moving sense of levitation, his home which is in the mind of the main character in the
satellite station is wet and soaked with water. It seems to me to be sweat and tears that in his
heartbreaking agony he sqeezed out of his whole being. And what makes us shudder is the shot of the
location of Akasakamitsuke, Tokyo, Japan. By a skillful use of mirrors, he turned flows of head lights
and tail lamps of cars, multiplied and amplified, into a vintage image of the future city. Every shot of
Solaris bears witness to the almost dazzling talents inherent in Tarkovsky.
Many people grumble that Tarkovsky's films are difficult, but I don't think so. His films just show how
extraordinarily sensitive Tarkovsky is. He made a film titled Mirror after Solaris. Mirror deals with his
cherished memories in his childhood, and many people say again it is disturbingly difficult. Yes, at a
glance, it seems to have no rational development in its storytelling. But we have to remember: it is
impossible that in our soul our childhood memories should arrange themselves in a static, logical
sequence.
A strange train of fragments of early memory images shattered and broken can bring about the poetry in
our infancy. Once you are convinced of its truthfulness, you may find Mirror the easiest film to
understand. But Tarkovsky remains silent, without saying things like that at all. His very attitude makes
me believe that he has wonderful potentials in his future.
There can be no bright future for those who are ready to explain everything about their own film.
[The following is excerpts taken from Kurosawa's "obituary on Andrei Tarkovsky"]
"I miss him dearly. He died at the age of 54. He died too young...,"
"He always looked at me with his adoring bright eyes. I will never forget the look in his amicable eyes.
Both of us agreed on many things about life and film. But we are so different in disposition that our
outputs are quite opposite in character. He is a poet, I am not."
We talked with each other and agreed that a movie should not attempt to explain anything. Cinema is not
a suitable medium for explanation. Those who view it must be left free to sense its content. It should be
open to a variety of interpretations. However, Tarkovsky absolutely never explains, he gives no
explanation at all. His thoroughness is incredible...
"His unusual sensitivity is both overwhelming and astounding. It almost reaches a pathological intensity.
Probably there is no equal among film directors alive now. For instance we often see water in his films,
which is portrayed in a manifold variety of expressiveness. Such is the case in The Sacrifice; one sky-
reflecting pool and one without sky reflection. The camera shot the images under strict guidance from the
director, whose aim was extraordinarily hard to achieve."
I love all of Tarkovsky's films. I love his personality and all his works. Every cut from his films is a
marvelous image in itself. But the finished image is nothing more than the imperfect accomplishment of
his idea. His ideas are only realized in part. And he had to make do with it.
[The Following is an excerpt from Kurosawa's book "A Dream is a Genius", on Andrei Tarkovsky]
I was on very intimate terms with Tarkovsky. I used to have my office in the old building of the Akasaka
Prince Hotel, where he managed somehow to visit me. It was our first encounter. And then he saw how
Akasaka looked when night fell. You may see what I mean by viewing Solaris. He made a wonderful
use of Akasaka by night, although he had the images processed by reflecting them against the mirrors.
The night scene of Metropolitan Highway with bright red

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future city life. You know, I saw the film by preview in Moscow for the first
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for my office now." I felt as if I were doing so while staying in Moscow.
Every film by Tarkovsky is marvelous, indeed. He was especially marvelous in handling the Water
Element, as seen, for example, in Solaris and Sacrifice. He was somehow able to shoot a pond or water
pool as transparent as to allow us to see through to the very bottom. You know, if you do it in an
ordinary way, you will for sure find the sky reflected on the water surface. I, too, wanted to shoot water
as he did, in making an episode of the Village of Watermills in Dreams. Can you imagine what we did to
achieve that? We set up huge cranes soaring to the sky to put up a huge black cloth to prevent the sky
reflection on the water surface. Now the riverbed became visible.
You know, the crew on the space station in Solaris suffer from the longing to return to Planet Earth. That
is why we see a long, long series of sequences of nature on earth, such as waterweeds softly dancing in a
river. It makes the audience really want to return to Earth, indeed. The Japanese distribution company
told me to leave a bit of it out, because nature shots were too long. If you had done so, the film should
have become meaningless. After all, my insistence saved the film from being cut.
This shows that there is something a little bit difficult about his films. I am sure, however, that it is to his
great merit. His films are somehow a little bit different from the rest of many ordinary films easy to
understand. I hear his father is a famous poet. So Andrei has a great poetic talent and quality.
Tarkovsky told me that he always sees Seven Samurai before shooting his new films. This is to say that I
always see his Andrei Rublov before shooting. [...]
Andrei was an amicable, charming man. I heard he was in hospital in Paris when I was staying in
Europe. I was anxious to inquire after him, and desperately tried to find out the hospital, until at last I had
to give up because of the departure time of the plane. [...] Soon after that, I got news of his death. Well,
in short, somehow, I always felt as if he was my younger brother.
Persona
Ingmar Bergman
[On Orson Welles] For me he's just a hoax. It's empty. It's not interesting. It's dead. Citizen Kane, which
I have a copy of - is all the critics' darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it's a total
bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie's got is absolutely
unbelievable.
[On Orson Welles] I've never liked Welles as an actor, because he's not really an actor. In Hollywood
you have two categories, you talk about actors and personalities. Welles was an enormous personality,
but when he plays Othello, everything goes down the drain, you see, that's when he croaks. In my eyes
he's an infinitely overrated filmmaker.
[On Jean-Luc Godard] I've never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux
intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a
fucking bore. He's made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin Féminin (1966), was shot
here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring.
[On Jean-Luc Godard in an interview with John Simon (1971)]

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OCTprofession,
APR MAYI always admire 👤
people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is,
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always admire
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pictures. I sit for perhaps twenty-five or thirty or fifty minutes and then I have to leave, because his
pictures make me so nervous. I have the feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don't
understand what it is, and sometimes I have the feeling that he's bluffing, double-crossing me.
[On Claude Chabrol] A marvelous storyteller in a specific genre. I've always had a weakness for his
thrillers, just as I have for Jean-Pierre Melville, whose stylized approach to the crime drama is
accompanied by an excellent sense of how to light each scene. I love seeing his pictures. He was also
one of the first directors who really understand how to use CinemaScope in an intelligent and sensitive
way.
[On Andrei Tarkovsky] When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest
of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he
explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the
most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so
naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in
embarrassing failure - The Serpent's Egg, The Touch, Face to Face and so on.
[On Andrei Tarkovsky] My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle. Suddenly I found
myself standing at the door of a room, the key to which, until then, had never been given to me. It was a
room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged
and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.
Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it
captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.
A French critic cleverly wrote that "with Autumn Sonata Bergman does Bergman." It is witty but
unfortunate. For me, that is. I think it is only too true that Bergman (Ingmar, that is) did a Bergman.... I
love and admire the filmmaker Tarkovsky and believe him to be one of the greatest of all time. My
admiration for Fellini is limitless. But I also feel that Tarkovsky began to make Tarkovsky films and that
Fellini began to make Fellini films. Yet Kurosawa has never made a Kurosawa film. I have never been
able to appreciate Buñuel. He discovered at an early stage that it is possible to fabricate ingenious tricks,
which he elevated to a special kind of genius, particular to Buñuel, and then he repeated and varied his
tricks. He always received applause. Buñuel nearly always made Buñuel films.
Fellini is Fellini. He is not honest, he is not dishonest, he is just Fellini. And he is not responsible. You
cannot put moralistic points of view on Fellini; it is impossible. He is just—I live him.
[On Federico Fellini] He is enormously intuitive. He is intuitive; he is creative; he is an enormous force.

He is burning inside with such heat. Collapsing. Do you understand what I mean? The heat from his
creative mind, it melts him. He suffers from it; he suffers physically from it. One day when he can
manage this heat and can set it free, I think he will make pictures you have never seen in your life. He is
rich. As every real artist, he will go back to his sources one day. He will find his way back.
[On Federico Fellini] We were supposed to collaborate once, and along with Kurosawa make one love
story each for a movie produced by Dino de Laurentiis. I flew down to Rome with my script and spent a
lot of time with Fellini while we waited for Kurosawa, who finally couldn’t leave Japan because of his
health, so the project went belly-up. Fellini was about to finish Satyricon. I spent a lot of time in the
studio and saw him work. I loved him both as a director and as a person, and I still watch his movies,
like La Strada and that childhood rememberance…
Fellini, Kurosawa and Bunuel move in the same fields as Tarkovsky.

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expired, suffocated by his own tediousness. Melies was always there without having to think about it. He
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[On Michelangelo Antonioni] He's done two masterpieces, you don't have to bother with the rest. One is
Blow-Up, which I've seen many times, and the other is La Notte, also a wonderful film, although that's
mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido, and damn what
a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He
concentrated on single images, never realizing that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure,
there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don't feel anything for L'Avventura, for example. Only
indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse
Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.
[On Michelangelo Antonioni] Antonioni has never properly learnt his craft. He’s an aesthete. If, for
example, he needs a certain kind of road for The Red Desert, then he gets the houses repainted on the
damned street. That is the attitude of an aesthete. He took great care over a single shot, but didn’t
understand that a film is a rhythmic stream of images, a living, moving process; for him, on the contrary,
it was such a shot, then another shot, then yet another. So, sure, there are some brilliant bits in his films…
[but] I can’t understand why Antonioni is held in such high esteem.
[On Michelangelo Antonioni] The strange thing is that I admire him more now that I have met him than
when I only saw his pictures; because I have suddenly understood what he is doing. I understand that
everything in his mind, in his point of view, in his personal behavior is against his film-making. And still
he makes his pictures.
[On Alfred Hitchcock] I think he's a very good technician. And he has something in Psycho (1960), he
had some moments. "Psycho" is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture
very fast, with very primitive means. He had little money, and this picture tells very much about him. Not
very good things. He is completely infantile, and I would like to know more - no, I don't want to know -
about his behavior with, or, rather, against women. But this picture is very interesting.
In my job it’s a torment not to be physically nimble. To have to drag a great heavy body around with one
is dreadfully unpleasant physically.
I’ve often thought how Hitchcock must suffer from it. Much of Hitchcock’s limitations, I think, but also
his greatness within them, are to be found in his heavy body. His way of always working in the studio,
using a static camera, not moving about, he has erected it all into a system, using long scenes where he
won’t have to give himself the trouble to move about.
[On Francois Truffaut] I liked Truffaut enormously, I admired him. His way of relating with an audience,
of telling a story, is both fascinating and tremendously appealing. It's not my style of storytelling, but it
works wonderfully well in relation to the film medium.
I suppose I must have a particular weakness for silent films from the second half of the twenties, before
the cinema was taken over by sound. At that time, the cinema was in the process of creating its own
language. There was Murnau and The Last Laugh, with Jannings, a film told solely in images with a
fantastic suppleness; then his Faust, and finally his masterpiece, Sunrise. Three astonishing works that
tell us that Murnau, at the same time as Stroheim in Hollywood, was well on the way to creating a
magnificently original and distinct language. I have many favourites among the German films of this
period.
[On Marcel Carné and Julien Duvivier] Carné and Duvivier were decisive influences in my wanting to
become a filmmaker. It was between 1936 and 1939 when seeing Carné’s Quai des brumes, Hôtel du
Nord and Le jour se lève, and Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko and Un carnet de bal had a huge impact on me. I
told myself that, if I ever managed to become a director,

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OCT to make films,
APR MAY 👤like
Carné! Those films affected me enormously.
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Among today's directors I'm of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese [Martin Scorsese],
and Coppola [Francis Ford Coppola], even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven
Soderbergh - they all have something to say, they're passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the
filmmaking process. Soderbergh's Traffic is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength
of American cinema is American Beauty and Magnolia.
8½
Federico Fellini
[on Akira Kurosawa] I think he is the greatest example of all that an author of the cinema should be. I
feel a fraternal affinity with his way of telling a story.
[On Ingmar Bergman] I have a profound admiration for him and his work, even though I haven't seen all
of his films. First of all, he is a master of his metier. Secondly, he is able to make things mysterious,
compelling, colorful and, at times, repulsive. Because of that, he has the right to talk about other people
and to be listened to by other people. Like a medieval troubadour, he can sit in the middle of the room
and hold his audience by telling stories, singing, playing the guitar, reading poetry, doing sleight of hand.
He has the seductive quality of mesmerizing your attention. Even if you're not in full agreement with
what he says, you enjoy the way he says it, his way of seeing the world with such intensity. He is one
the most complete cinematographic creators I have ever seen.
Hitchcock I highly esteem, and for qualities the opposite of mine—for his qualities as a scientist,
biologist, and his deep sense of humor that gives life to this vision that he has, which is so touching and
scientific.
[On Charlie Chaplin] A sort of Adam from whom we are all descended.
[On Michelangelo Antonioni] I feel my inheritance as a film director is from art, and Michelangelo’s is
from literature. My films, like my life, are summed up in circus, spaghetti, sex, and cinema.
[On Michelangelo Antonioni] I have respect for his constancy, his fanatical integrity, and his refusal to
compromise. Antonioni had a very difficult professional beginning. His films for many years were not
accepted, and another man, less honest, less strong, would have made retreats. But Antonioni kept on his
solitary road, doing what he believed he should do until he was recognized as a great creator. This has
always made an enormous impression on me. He is an artist who knows what he wants to say, and that's
a lot.
[On Vittorio De Sica] Great power of achievement, and a master of his actors. He stems from our
marvelous era of neorealism. He is a very good director, someone almost untouchable, because of the
special place he occupied after the war.
With the death of Sergei Parajanov cinema lost one of its magicians. (July, 1990)
Solaris
Andrei Tarkovsky
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much. His way of thinking, his paradoxical, poetical . . . ability to love the beauty and the ability to be
absolutely free within his own vision.
Why is Kurosawa so good? Because he doesn't belong to any genre. The historical genre? No, this is
more likely resurrected history, convincingly true, not bearing any relation to the canons of the "historical
genre."
[On Akira Kurosawa] The main thing is his modern characters, modern problems, and the modern
method of studying life. That's self-evident. He never set himself the task of copying the life of samurai
of a certain historical period. One perceives his Middle Ages without any exoticism. He is such a
profound artist, he shows such psychological connections, such a development of characters and plot-
lines, such a vision of the world, that his narrative about the Middle Ages constantly makes you think
about today's world. You feel that you somehow already know all of this. It's the principle of recognition.
That's the greatest quality of art according to Aristotle. When you recognize something personal in the
work, something sacred, you experience joy. Kurosawa is also interesting for his social analysis of
history. If you compare The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, which share the same plot, it is
especially visible. Kurosawa's historicism is based on characters. Moreover these are not conventional
characters, but ones which issue from the circumstances of the protagonists' life. Each samurai has his
own individual fate, although each possesses nothing except the ability to use a sword; and, not wanting
to do anything else because of his pride, each finds himself serving peasants to defend them from the
enemy. There is a text of pure genius at the end of the film, remember, over the grave, when they plant
rice: samurai come and go, but the nation remains. That's the idea. They are like the wind, blown this
way and that. Only the peasants remain on the earth.
I love Kurosawa, although I don't like his Throne of Blood, for example. I think he copied Shakespeare's
plot in a superficial manner and transferred it to Japanese history, without really succeeding.
Shakespeare's Macbeth is much more profound, both in the character of its protagonist and in the tragedy
that penetrates the action. I love The Seven Samurai and Sanjuro. Remarkable pictures. Remarkable
director. One of the best in the world, what can I say.
I like Fellini for his kindness, for his love of people, for his, let`s say, simplicity and intimate intonation.
If you would like to know - not for popularity, but rather for his humanity. I value him tremendously.
[When asked why he 'never showed up in Rome] I was too shy. Bergman and Fellini are way too big for
me.
I have a horror of tags and labels. I don't understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman's
'symbolism'. Far from being symbolic, he seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to
arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.
There are two basic categories of film directors. One consists of those who seek to imitate the world in
which they live, the other of those who seek to create their own world. The second category contains the
poets of cinema, Bresson, Dovzenko, Mizoguchi, Bergman, Buñuel and Kurosawa, the cinema's most
important names. The work of these film-makers is difficult to distribute: it reflects their inner aspirations,
and this always runs counter to public taste. This does not mean that the film-makers don't want to be
understood by their audience. But rather that they themselves try to pick up on and understand the inner
feelings of the audience.
I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman.
There are few people of genius in the cinema; look

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Mizoguchi,
OCT APRDovzhenko,
MAY Paradjanov,
👤
Bunuel: not one of them could be confused with anyone else. An artist of07 that calibre follows one
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always in the name of the one idea, the one conception.
There are many reasons I consider Bresson a unique phenomenon in the world of film. Indeed, Bresson
is one of the artists who has shown that cinema is an artistic discipline on the same level as the classic
artistic disciplines such as poetry, literature, painting, and music.
The second reason I admire Bresson is personal. It is the significance of his work for me–the vision of
the world that it expresses. This vision of the world is expressed in an ascetic way, almost laconic,
lapidary I would say. Very few artists succeed in this. Every serious artist strives for simplicity, but only a
few manage to achieve it. Bresson is one of the few who has succeeded.
The third reason is the inexhaustibility of Bresson’s artistic form. That is, one is compelled to consider his
artistic form as life, nature itself. In that sense, I find him very close to the oriental artistic concept of Zen:
depth within narrowly defined limits. Working with these forms, Bresson attempts in his films not to be
symbolic; he tries to create a form as inexhaustible as nature, life itself. Of course this doesn’t always
work. In fact, there are episodes in his films that are extremely symbolic and, therefore, limited–symbolic
and not poetic.
For me Bresson stands as an ideal of simplicity. And from that point of view, I, just like everybody else
who strives for simplicity and depth, can’t help but identify with what he has achieved in this field. But
on the other hand, even if Bresson would never have existed, we would have eventually come across
this notion of a lapidary style, simplicity and depth. And when people tell me during the shooting of my
film that a certain scene is in a way reminiscent of Bresson–and this has happened–I will immediately
change the approach to avoid any resemblance. If there’s such an influence, it doesn’t show on the
surface of my work. This is an influence of a deeper nature. It’s a moral influence between artists,
without which art cannot exist.
Bresson is perhaps the only man in the cinema to have achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work
with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand. I know of no other artist as consistent as he is in this
respect. His guiding principle was the elimination of what is known as expressiveness, in the sense that
he wanted to do away with the frontier between the image and actual life; that is, to render life itself
graphic and expressive. No special feeding in of material, nothing laboured, nothing that smacks of
deliberate generalisation.
Bresson is a genius. Here I can state it plainly — he is a genius. If he occupies the first place, the next
director occupies the tenth. This distance is very depressing.
When I am working, it helps me a lot to think of Bresson. Only the thought of Bresson! I don't remember
any of his works concretely. I remember only his supremely ascetic manner. His simplicity. His clarity.
The thought of Bresson helps me to concentrate on the central idea of the film.
Robert Bresson is for me an example of a real and genuine film-maker... He obeys only certain higher,
objective laws of Art.... Bresson is the only person who remained himself and survived all the pressures
brought by fame.
Bresson has always astonished me and attracted me with his ascetics. It seems to me that he is the only
director in the world, that has achieved absolute simplicity in cinema. As it was achieved in music by
Bach, in art by Leonardo da Vinci... Tolstoy achieved it as a writer...for me he`s always been an example
of ingenious simplicity.
What is Bresson's genre? He doesn't have one. Bresson is Bresson. He is a genre in himself. Antonioni,
Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Dovzhenko, Vigo, Mizoguchi, Bunuel - each is identified with himself.
The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb. And is Chaplin

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go - comedy?
OCT APRNo: he is Chaplin,
MAY 👤 pure and
18 captures 07
simple; a unique phenomenon, never to be repeated. He is unadulterated hyperbole; but above all he
19 May stuns
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Chaplin is the only person to have gone down into cinematic history without any shadow of a doubt.
The films he left behind can never grow old.
What can one say, for instance, about the way Antonioni works with his actors in L’Avventura? Or
Orson Welles in Citizen Kane? All we are aware of is the unique conviction of the character. But this is a
qualitatively different, screen conviction, the principles of which are not those that make acting
expressive in a theatrical sense.
Antonioni has made a strong impression on me with his films, especially with adventures... I realised
then, watching this film, that "action", the meaning of action in cinema is rather conditional. There is
practically no action going on in Antonioni’s films. And that is the meaning of “action” in Antonioni
films. More precisely, in those Antonioni films that I like the most.
I remember Vigo with tenderness and thankfulness, who, in my opinion, is the father of modern French
cinema.
[On Kenji Mizoguchi] One of the "exalted figures who soar above the earth... such an artist can convey
the lines of the poetic design of being. He is capable of going beyond the limitations of coherent logic,
and conveying the deep complexity and truth of the impalpable connections and hidden phenomena of
life.
Eisenstein was a director completely misunderstood by Soviet leaders, especially by Stalin.

Misunderstood — because had Stalin understood the essence of Eisenstein's work he'd never have
started to persecute him. This is a total mystery to me. I know how it happened, more or less I have an
idea. Eisenstein was brilliant, thoroughly educated; at that time in cinema no director was so educated, so
intelligent. Cinema was made by young boys then, typically self-taught, with no formal education at all,
they came to cinema sort of straight from the revolution.
Eisenstein was one of the few, perhaps the only one who appreciated the significance of tradition, he
knew what continuity was, cultural heritage. But he didn't absorb it, in his heart, he was over-
intellectualised, he was a terrible rationalist, cold, calculated, directed only by reason. He tried his
constructions on paper first. Like a calculator. He drew everything. Not that he drew film frames but that
he would think everything over and then he'd cram it all inside the frame. He didn't draw from life, life
didn't influence him in any way. What influenced him was ideas which he constructed, transformed into
some form, as a rule completely lifeless, rigid as iron, very formal, dry, devoid of any feeling. Film form,
its formal features, photography, light, atmosphere — none of it existed for him at all, it all had this
thought-out character, whether some quotes from paintings or other contrived compositions.This was in a
sense a typical concept of synthetic cinema, where cinema appeared as a union of graphic arts, painting,
theatre, music, and everything else — except cinema as such wasn't there. As if the sum of all these parts
were to result in this new art.
Eisenstein didn't succeed in expressing through his art what we call the specific art of cinema, he utilised
a bit of everything and didn't notice what was specific to cinematography. Had he noticed, he'd have cut,
thrown aside all remaining types of art and would have left only "it" in it.
[On Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko] It is difficult for me to speak about him because I am
afraid of being misunderstood. Beyond a doubt, I consider Eisenstein a great director and regard him
highly. I really love Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, and The Old and the New, but I cannot accept his
historical pictures. I think they are unusually theatrical. Incidentally, Dovzhenko spoke exhaustively
about this; perhaps they had some kind of problem with

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors each other.
Go OCT MajorAPR
artists
MAYoften have sharp
👤
conflicts amongst themselves, but in any case his words "A daytime opera"
18 captures 07 seem correct. Because
everything is
19 May 2014 - 7 Apr 2016 flimsy. Cinema should capture life in the forms in which it
2015 exists
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2017use images
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thislife
capture
itself. It is the most realistic art form in terms of form. The form in which the cinematic shot exists should
be a reflection of the forms of real life. The director has only to choose the moments he will capture and
to construct a whole out of them.
[On Alexander Dovzhenko]...In that era of silent movies, he made miracles... poetic cinema.
Dovzhenko is certainly closest to my heart because he felt nature like nobody else, he was really attached
to earth. This is for me very important in general. Of course here I have in mind the early Dovzhenko
from his silent period — he meant a lot to me. I'm thinking above all about his concept of spiritualisation
of nature, this sort of pantheism. In some sense — not literally of course — I feel very close to
pantheism. And pantheism has left a strong mark on Dovzhenko, he loved nature very much, he was
able to see and feel it. This is what was so meaningful to me, I consider it very important. After all Soviet
filmmakers could not feel nature at all, they didn't understand it, it didn't resonate with them in any way,
it didn't mean anything. Dovzhenko was the only director who did not tear cinematographic image away
from the atmosphere, from this earth, from this life, etc. For other directors all that was a background,
more or less natural, a rigid background while for him this was the element, he somehow felt internally
connected with nature's life.
A director like Spielberg has an enormous audience and earns enormous sums and everybody is happy
about that, but he is no artist and his films are not art. If I made films like him — and I don't believe I can
— I would die from sheer terror. Art is as a mountain: there is a peak and surrounding it there are
foothills. What exists at the summit cannot by definition be understood by everyone.
The 400 Blows
François Truffaut
Originally, I didn't like [John Ford]--because of his material: for example, the comic secondary
characters, the brutality, the male-female relationships typified by the man's slapping the woman on the
backside. But eventually I came to understand that he had achieved an absolute uniformity of technical
expertise. And his technique is the more admirable for being unobtrusive: His camera is invisible; his
staging is perfect; he maintains a smoothness of surface in which no one scene is allowed to become
more important than any other. Such mastery is possible only after one has made an enormous number of
films. Questions of quality aside, John Ford is the Georges Simenon of directors.
[On Michelangelo Antonioni] Antonioni is the only important director I have nothing good to say about.
He bores me; he's so solemn and humorless.
The talent of Godard goes toward a destructive object. Like Picasso, to whom he's compared very often,
he destroys what he does; the act of creation is destructive. I like to work in tradition, in the constructive
tradition.
{Eric] Rohmer is the best French director now. He became famous very late compared to the rest of us,
but for 15 years he's been behind us all the time. He's influenced us from behind for a long time.
Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings.
Nowadays, the work of Alfred Hitchcock is admired

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directorsall over the
Go world.
OCT Young
APR MAY people who are
👤 just
discovering his art through the current rerelease of Rear Window and Vertigo,
18 captures 07 or through North by
19 May Northwest,
2014 - 7 Apr 2016may assume his prestige has always been recognized, but this2016
2015 is far2017
from being the case.
In the fifties and sixties, Hitchcock was at the height of his creativity and popularity. He was, of course,
famous due to the publicity masterminded by producer David O. Selznick during the six or seven years
of their collaboration on such films as Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, and The Paradine Case.
His fame had spread further throughout the world via the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in
the mid-fifties. But American and European critics made him pay for his commercial success by
reviewing his work with condescension, and by belittling each new film.
(...)
In examining his films, it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art than any
of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a
systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to
Hitchcock.
That is what this book is all about.
There are two kinds of directors; those who have the public in mind when they conceive and make their
films and those who don't consider the public at all. For the former, cinema is an art of spectacle; for the
latter, it is an individual adventure. There is nothing intrinsically better about one or the other; it's simply
a matter of different approaches. For Hitchcock as for Renoir, as for that matter almost all American
directors, a film has not succeeded unless it is a success, that is, unless it touches the public that one has
had in mind right from the moment of choosing the subject matter to the end of production. While
Bresson, Tati, Rossellini, Ray make films their own way and then invite the public to join the "game,"
Renoir, Clouzot, Hitchcock and Hawks make movies for the public, and ask themselves all the questions
they think will interest their audience. Alfred Hitchcock, who is a remarkably intelligent man, formed the
habit early--right from the start of his career in England--of predicting each aspect of his films. All his life
he has worked to make his own tastes coincide with the public', emphasizing humor in his English
period and suspense in his American period. This dosage of humor and suspense has made Hitchcock
one of the most commercial directors in the world (his films regularly bring in four times what they cost).
It is the strict demands he makes on himself and on his art that have made him a great director.
The main complaint against some critics--and a certain type of criticism--is that too seldom do they speak
about cinema as such. The scenario of a film is the film; all films are not psychological.
Every critic should take to heart Jean Renoir's remark, "All great art is abstract." He should learn to be
aware of form, and to understand that certain artists, for example Dreyer or Von Sternberg, never sought
to make a picture that resembled reality.
[On Jean Renoir] The world's greatest film-maker.
[On Jean Renoir] I think Renoir is the only filmmaker who's practically infallible, who has never made a
mistake on film. And I think if he never made mistakes, it's because he always found solutions based on
simplicity—human solutions. He's one film director who never pretended. He never tried to have a style,
and if you know his work—which is very comprehensive, since he dealt with all sorts of subjects—
when you get stuck, especially as a young filmmaker, you can think of how Renoir would have handled
the situation, and you generally find a solution.
[On Roberto Rossellini] Rossellini reinforced a trait already evident in Renoir: the desire to stay as close
to life as possible in a fiction film.
I’m very influenced by men like Rossellini—and Renoir—who managed to free themselves of any
complex about the cinema, for whom the character, story, or theme is more important than anything else.
[On Roberto Rossellini] In some of my films I’ve tried to follow

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Goa single character
OCT APR MAYsimply and👤honestly
in an almost documentary manner, and I owe this method to Rossellini. Aside
18 captures 07 from Vigo, Rossellini is
19 May the
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2016 who has filmed adolescence without sentimentality
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2016 400 Blows owes
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Clearly, Vigo was closest to Renoir, but he forged further into bluntness and surpassed him in his love of
the image. Both were brought up for the task in an atmosphere that was both rich and poor, aristocratic
and common. But Renoir's heart never bled...[Vigo's] films were faithful, sad, funny, affectionate and
brotherly...
[On Jean Vigo] What was Vigo’s secret? Probably he lived more intensely than most of us. Filmmaking
is awkward because of the disjointed nature of the work. You shoot five to fifteen seconds and then stop
for an hour. On the film set there is seldom the opportunity for the concentrated intensity a writer like
Henry Miller might have enjoyed at his desk. By the time he had written twenty pages, a kind of fever
possessed him, carried him away; it could be tremendous, even sublime. Vigo seems to have worked
continuously in this state of trance, without ever losing his clearheadedness.
My religion is cinema. I believe in Charlie Chaplin…
Like Fellini, I think that the "noble" film is the trap of traps, the sneakiest swindle in the industry. For a
real film-maker, nothing could be more boring to make than a "Bridge On The River Kwai" - scenes set
inside office alternating with discussions between old fogies and some action scenes usually filmed by
another crew. Rubbish, traps for fools, Oscar machines.
Luis Buñuel is, perhaps, somewhere between Renoir and Bergman. One would gather that Buñuel finds
mankind imbecilic but life diverting. All this he tells us very mildly, even a bit indirectly, but it's there in
the overall impression we get from his films. Even though he has very little stomach for "messages,"
Buñuel did manage to make one of those rare, truly antiracist movies, The Young One (1960), the only
film he has shot in English. It succeeded because of his masterful ability to intertwine sympathetic and
unsympathetic characters and to shuffle the cards in his psychological game while he addresses us in
perfectly clear, logical language.
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Luis Buñuel
I knew de Sica well and especially liked Shoeshine, Umberto D, and The Bicycle Thief, where he
succeeded in making a machine the star of the movie.
[On Jean-Luc Godard] I’ll give him two years more, he is just a fashion.
[On John Huston] A great director and a wonderfully warm person, Huston saw Nazarin while he was
in Mexico and spent the next morning telephoning all over Europe and arranging for it to be shown at
Cannes.
The 39 Steps
Alfred Hitchcock
[On Michelangelo Antonioni] This young Italian

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors guy is starting
Goto worry me.
OCT APR MAY 👤
18 captures
[On Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini] Those Italian fellows
07
19 May 2014 - 7 Apr 2016 2015 are
2016a hundred
2017 years ahead of us.
Blow-Up (1966) and 8½ (1963) are bloody masterpieces.
L’avventura
Michelangelo Antonioni
[On Federico Fellini] I believe Federico was more concerned with the outer life of the people in his
films. I am concerned with their inner lives—why they do what they do.
Parajanov, in my opinion, is one of best film directors in the world.
[On Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut] Godard flings reality in our faces, and I’m struck by this.
But never by Truffaut.
[On François Truffaut] I think his films are like a river, lovely to see, to bathe in, extraordinarily
refreshing and pleasant. Then the water flows and is gone. Very little of the pleasant feeling remains
because I soon feel dirty again and need another bath. His images are as powerful as those of Resnais or
Godard, but his stories are frivolous. I suppose that's what I object to. René Clair told light stories too,
but they touch me more. I don't know why Truffaut's leave me unmoved. I'm not trying to say that he has
no significance. I only mean that the way he tells a story doesn't come to anything. Perhaps he doesn't
tell my kind of story. Perhaps that's it.
The Leopard
Luchino Visconti
[1976 comment on Luis Buñuel] I think today there are too many directors taking themselves seriously;
the only one capable of saying anything really new and interesting is Luis Bunuel. He's a very great
director.
[On Ingmar Bergman] I don't begin to share his way of seeing things any more than his obsessions. All
the same I find him interesting. And his universe is much stranger yet than any Japanese filmmaker.
[On Michelangelo Antonioni] It seems that boredom is one of the great discoveries of our time. If so,
there's no question but that he must be considered a pioneer.
City Lights
Charles Chaplin
[On D.W. Griffith] The teacher of us all.
[On D.W. Griffith] The whole industry owes its existence to him.

Paths
18 captures of Glory 07
Stanley Kubrick
There are very few directors, about whom you'd say you automatically have to see everything they do.
I'd put Fellini, Bergman and David Lean at the head of my first list, and Truffaut at the head of the next
level. - Stanley Kubrick (1966)
I believe Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini are the only three filmmakers in the
world who are not just artistic opportunists. By this I mean they don't just sit and wait for a good story to
come along and then make it. They have a point of view which is expressed over and over and over
again in their films, and they themselves write or have original material written for them.
[On Ingmar Bergman] His vision of life has moved me deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been
moved by any films. I believe he is the greatest film-maker, unsurpassed by anyone in the creation of
mood and atmosphere, the subtlety of performance, the avoidance of the obvious, the truthfulness and
completeness of characterization. To this one must also add everything else that goes into the making of a
film; and I look forward with eagerness to each of his films.
[On being asked if he consciously favors a particular style of shooting] If something is really happening
on the screen, it isn't crucial how it's shot. Chaplin had such a simple cinematic style that it was almost
like I Love Lucy, but you were always hypnotised by what was going on, unaware of the essentially
non-cinematic style. He frequently used cheap sets, routine lighting and so forth, but he made great films.
His films will probably last longer than anyone else's. You could say that Chaplin was no style and all
content. On the other hand, the opposite can be seen in Eisenstein's films, who is all style and no content
or, depending on how generous you want to be, little content. Many of Eisenstein's films are really quite
silly; but they are so beautifully made, so brilliantly cinematic, that, despite their heavily propagandistic
simplemindedness, they become important.
Eisenstein does it with cuts, Max Ophuls does it with fluid movement. Chaplin does it with nothing.
Eisenstein seems to be all form and no content, Chaplin is all content and little form. Nobody could have
shot a film in a more pedestrian way than Chaplin. Nobody could have paid less attention to story than
Eisenstein. Alexander Nevsky is, after all, a pretty dopey story. Potemkin is built around a heavy
propaganda story. But both are great filmmakers.
Highest of all I would rate Max Ophuls, who for me possessed every possible quality. He has an
exceptional flair for sniffing out good subjects, and he got the most out of them. He was also a
marvellous director of actors.
[On Elia Kazan in 1957] without question the best director we have in America. And he's capable of
performing miracles with the actors he uses.
I think there’s an intriguing irony in naming the lifetime achievement award after D.W. Griffith because
his career was both an inspiration and a cautionary tale. His best films were always ranked among the
most important films ever made. And some of them made him a great deal of money. He was
instrumental in transforming movies from the nickelodeon novelty to an art form. And he originated and
formalized much of the syntax of movie-making now taken for granted.
He became an international celebrity and his patronage included many of the world’s leading artists and
statesmen of the time. But Griffith was always ready to take tremendous risks in his films and in his
business affairs. He was always ready to fly too high. And in the end, the wings of fortune proved for
him, like those of Icarus, to be made of nothing more substantial than wax and feathers, and like Icarus,
when he flew too close to the sun, they melted. And the man who’s
https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go OCTfameAPR
exceeded
MAY the most 👤illustrious
filmmakers of today spent the last 17 years of his life shunned by the film07
industry he had created.
18 captures
On the Waterfront
Elia Kazan
[On John Ford] Orson Welles was once asked which American directors most appealed to him. "The old
masters," he replied. "By which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford." Well, I studied "Young
Mr. Lincoln," for example. As I say, John Ford had a big influence on me.
I want to add my voice to those of Scorsese and Merchant in asking the Academy grant Satyajit Ray an
Honorary Lifetime Achievement Award. I have admired his films for many years and for me he is the
filmic voice of India, speaking for the people of all classes of the country...He is the most sensitive and
eloquent artist and it can truly be said in his case that when we honor him we are honoring ourselves.
The first artist I admired in my life was Sergei Eisenstein. The second man I admired was Alexander
Dovzhenko and a picture called Air City (Aerograd). These men were like idols, and you are affected by
your idols, as I was by Renoir’s films. So, I became a film director out of admiration, out of wanting to
be like that–hero worship. I think it’s the most wonderful art in the world.
Close-up
Abbas Kiarostami
My films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism, even though it was never
intended. Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated. This was pointed out to me by
somebody who referred to the paintings of Rembrandt and his use of light: some elements are
highlighted while others are obscured or even pushed back into the dark. And it's something that we do -
we bring out elements that we want to emphasize. I'm not claiming or denying that I have done such a
thing but I do believe in [Robert] Bresson's method of creation through omission, not through addition.
Children are very strong and independent characters and can come up with more interesting things than
Marlon Brando, and it's sometimes very difficult to direct or order them to do something. When I met
Akira Kurosawa in Japan, one question he asked me was, 'How did you actually make the children act
the way they do? I do have children in my films but I find that I reduce and reduce their presence until I
have to get rid of them because there's no way that I can direct them.' My own thought is that one is very
grand, like an emperor on a horse, and it's very hard for a child to relate to that. In order to be able to
cooperate with a child, you have to come down to below their level in order to communicate with them.
Actors are also like children.
I think Woody Allen is Woody Allen, and no matter where he goes he still makes his Woody Allen films.
Tarkovsky's works separate me completely from physical life, and are the most spiritual films I have seen
— what Fellini did in parts of his movies, bringing dream life into film, he does as well. Theo
Angelopoulos' movies also find this type of spirituality at certain moments. In general, I think movies and
art should take us away from daily life, should take us to another state, even though daily life is where
this flight is launched from.

The Fire
18 captures Within 07
Louis Malle
[On Robert Bresson] There's something in the way Bresson makes films which puts me in mind of a
certain French tradition that comes from Racine. I don't really think that I was influenced by Bresson, but
I would say that I wish I had been.
Well, Fellini... there is always Fellini.
Three Colors
Krzysztof Kieślowski
[On Ingmar Bergman]: I can identify with what Bergman says about life, about what he says about love.
I identify more or less with his attitude towards the world... towards men and women and what we do in
everyday life... forgetting about what is most important.
[On Ingmar Bergman] This man is one of the few film directors — perhaps the only one in the world —
to have said as much about human nature as Dostoyevsky or Camus.
Andrey Tarkovsky was one of the greatest directors of recent years. He's dead, like most of them. That
is, most of them are dead or have stopped making films. Or else, somewhere along the way they've
irretrievably lost something, some individual sort of imagination, intelligence, or way of narrating a story.
Tarkovsky was certainly one of those who hadn't lost this.
I haven't got a great talent for films. Orson Welles, for example, managed to achieve this at the age of
twenty-four or twenty-six when he made 'Citizen Kane' and, with his first film, climbed to the top, the
highest possible peak in cinema. But I'll need to take all my life to get there and I never will. I know that
perfectly well. I just keep on going. For me, [each film] isn't better or worse. It's all the same only a step
further, and, according to my own private scale of values, these are small steps which are taking me
nearer to a goal which I'll never reach anyway. I haven't got enough talent.
The Rules of the Game
Jean Renoir
Orson Welles is an animal made for the screen and the stage. When he steps before a camera, it is as if
the rest of the world ceases to exist. He is a citizen of the screen.
John Ford is a great man, no doubt. John ford is the man who gave a certain nobility to the western. But
the western could exist without John Ford. The westerns are something very strong and John Ford is
just, may I say, the best one among the western makers. But he is a man who is the head, who is the top
of the group. You know, with the new wave, the new wave is very different. Each one of the new wave
is just himself without any connections with anything else.
Leo McCarey understood people better than any other Hollywood director.
The master of masters, the filmmaker of filmmakers,

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors for me is Go
still Charlie
OCT APRChaplin.
MAY He has done
👤
everything in his films—script, direction, setting, production, performance07 and even the music… His
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of faith.
The Complete Mr. Arkadin
Orson Welles
I met D.W. Griffith only once and it was not a happy meeting. A cocktail party on a rainy afternoon in
the last year of the 1930s. Hollywood’s golden age, but for the greatest of all directors it had been a sad
and empty decade. The motion picture which he had virtually invented had become the product—the
exclusive product—of America’s fourth-largest industry, and on the assembly lines of the mammoth
movie factories there was no place for Griffith. He was an exile in his own town, a prophet without
honor, a craftsman without tools, an artist without work. No wonder he hated me. I, who knew nothing
about film, had just been given the greatest freedom ever written into a Hollywood contract. It was the
contract he deserved. I could see that he was not at all too old for it, and I couldn’t blame him for feeling
I was very much too young. We stood under one of those pink Christmas trees they have out there, and
drank our drinks and stared at each other across a hopeless abyss. I loved and worshipped him, but he
didn’t need a disciple. He needed a job. I have never really hated Hollywood except for its treatment of
D.W. Griffith.
I'm not bitter about Hollywood's treatment of me, but over its treatment of D.W. Griffith, Josef von
Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton and a hundred others.
[On René Clair] A real master: he invented his own Paris, which is better than recording it.
[On Federico Fellini] He's as gifted as anyone making pictures today. His limitation--which is also the
source of his charm--is that he's fundamentally very provincial. His films are a small-town boy's dream of
a big city. Is sophistication works because it is the creation of someone who doesn't have it. But he
shows dangerous signs of being a superlative artist with little to say.
[On Federico Fellini] Fellini is essentially a small-town boy who’s never really come to Rome. He’s still
dreaming about it. And we should all be very grateful for those dreams. In a way, he’s still standing
outside looking in through the gates.
[On Stanley Kubrick] Among those whom I would call 'younger generation' Kubrick appears to me to
be a giant.
...I believe that Kubrick can do everything. He is a great director who has not yet made his great film.
What I see in him is a talent not possessed by the great directors of the generation immediately preceding
his, I mean Ray, Aldrich, etc. Perhaps this is because his temperament comes closer to mine.
[On being asked how he felt about contemporary American directors] Stanley Kubrick and Richard
Lester are the only ones that appeal to me—except for the old masters. By which I mean John Ford, John
Ford and John Ford. I don't regard Alfred Hitchcock as an American director, though he's worked in
Hollywood for all these years. He seems to me tremendously English in the best Edgar Wallace tradition,
and no more. There's always something anecdotal about his work; his contrivances remain contrivances,
no matter how marvelously they're conceived and executed. I don't honestly believe that Hitchcock is a
director whose pictures will be of any interest a hundred years from now. With Ford at his best, you feel
that the movie has lived and breathed in a real world,

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Machree. With Hitchcock, it's a world of spooks.
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[On Alfred Hitchcock] There’s a certain icy calculation in a lot of Hitch’s work that puts me off. He says
he doesn’t like actors, and sometimes it look as though he doesn’t like people.
[On Alfred Hitchcock] I think he was senile a long time before he died.
I think it's very harmful to see movies for movie makers because you either imitate them or worry about
not imitating them and you should do movies innocently and i lost my innocence. Every time i see a
picture i lose something i don't gain. I never understand what directors mean when they compliment me
and say they've learned from my pictures because i don't believe in learning from other people's pictures.
You should learn from your own interior vision and discover innocently as though there had never been
D.W. Griffith or Eisenstein or Ford or Renoir or anybody.
The people who’ve done well within the [Hollywood] system are the people whose instincts, whose
desires [are in natural alignement with those of the producers] — who want to make the kind of movies
that producers want to produce. People who don’t succeed — people who’ve had long, bad times; like
[Jean] Renoir, for example, who I think was the best director, ever — are the people who didn’t want to
make the kind of pictures that producers want to make. Producers didn’t want to make a Renoir picture,
even if it was a success.
[On the death of Jean Renoir] The Greatest of all Directors.
[On Jean-Luc Godard] He’s the definitive influence if not really the first film artist of this last decade,
and his gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker—and that’s
where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most
movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin. But what’s so admirable about him is his
marvelous contempt for the machinery of movies and even movies themselves—a kind of anarchistic,
nihilistic contempt for the medium—which, when he’s at his best and most vigorous, is very exciting.
[On Luis Buñuel In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich] Jesus, it's all true. He's that kind of intellectual
and that kind of Catholic [. . .] A superb kind of person he must be. Everybody loves him.
[On Luis Buñuel In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich] He is a deeply Christian man who hates God
as only a Christian can,'' and, of course, he's very Spanish. I see him as the most supremely religious
director in the history of the movies.
[On Kenji Mizoguchi] No praise is too high for him.
I never could stand looking at Bette Davis, so I don't want to see her act, you see. I hate Woody Allen
physically, I dislike that kind of man. ['Henry Jaglom' (qv]: I've never understood why. Have you met
him? Oh, yes. I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination
of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge...Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is
unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts
shy, but he's not. He's scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It's people
like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me, it's the most embarrassing thing in the
world-a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups.
Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.
[In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich] Chaplin's a great artist—there can't be any argument about
that. It's just that he seldom makes the corners of my mouth move up. I find him easy to admire and hard
to laugh at.
[On Charlie Chaplin] a "genius" as an actor, but merely

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In handling a camera I feel that I have no peer. But what De Sica can do, I can't do. I ran his Shoeshine
recently and the camera disappeared, the screen disappeared; it was just life . . .
[On Buster Keaton] Keaton was beyond all praise…a very great artist, and one of the most beautiful men
I ever saw on the screen. He was also a superb director. In the last analysis, nobody came near him.
Keaton, one of the giants! … Now, finally, Keaton’s been ‘discovered’. Too late to him any good, of
course - he lived all those long years in eclipse, and then, just as the sun was coming out again, he died. I
wish I’d known him better than I did. A tremendously nice person, you know, but also a man of secrets.
I can’t even imagine what they were.
[On Michelangelo Antonioni] According to a young American critic, one of the great discoveries of our
age is the value of boredom as an artistic subject. If that is so, Antonioni deserves to be counted as a
pioneer and founding father. His movies are perfect backgrounds for fashion models. Maybe there aren’t
backgrounds that good in Vogue, but there ought to be. They ought to get Antonioni to design them.
[On Michelangelo Antonioni] I don't like to dwell on things. It's one of the reasons I'm so bored with
Antonioni - the belief that, because a shot is good, it's going to get better if you keep looking at it. He
gives you a full shot of somebody walking down a road. And you think, 'Well, he's not going to carry
that woman all the way up that road.' But he does. And then she leaves and you go on looking at the
road after she's gone.
[On Josef Von Sternberg] The King and Queen of camp.
[On Josef Von Sternberg] Admirable! He is the greatest exotic director of all time and one of the great
lights.
[On William Wyler] Wyler is this man. Only he's his own boss. His work, however, is better as boss than
as director, given the fact that in that role he spends his clearest moments waiting, with the camera, for
something to happen. He says nothing. He waits, as the producer waits in his office. He looks at twenty
impeccable shots, seeking the one that has something and, usually, he knows how to choose the best one.
As a director he is good but as a producer he is extraordinary.
[on Anthony Asquith] One of the nicest, most intelligent people who was ever in films . . . and my God,
he was polite. I saw him, all alone on the stage once, trip on an electric cable, turn around, and say, "I
beg your pardon" to it.
[about director W.S. Van Dyke, aka "Woody"] Woody made some very good comedies. And what a
system he had! . . . His retakes sometimes took longer than his original shooting schedule . . . He'd shoot
a "Thin Man" or something like that in about 20 days. Then he'd preview it and come back to the studio
for 30 days of retakes. For comedy, when you're worried about the laughs, that makes a lot of sense.
I don’t condemn that very northern, very Protestant world of artists like Bergman; it’s just not where I
live. The Sweden I like to visit is a lot of fun. But Bergman’s Sweden always reminds me of something
Henry James said about Ibsen’s Norway—that it was full of “the odor of spiritual paraffin.” How I
sympathize with that! I share neither Bergman’s interests nor his obsessions. He’s far more foreign to me
than the Japanese.
[On Robert J. Flaherty] I don't see where he fits into films at all, except as being one of the two or three
greatest people who ever worked in the medium.

The Music
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Satyajit Ray
Of all the Japanese directors, Kurosawa has been the most accessible to the outside world. There are
obvious reasons of this. He seems, for instance, to have a preference for simple, universal situations over
narrowly regional ones. The fear of nuclear destruction, graft in high places, the dehumanising effect of
bureaucracy, simple conflicts of good and evil, the moral allegory in Rashomon and so on. But most
importantly, I think, it is his penchant for movement, for physical action, which has won him so many
admirers in the west.
Bicycle Thieves is a triumphant discovery of the fundamentals of cinema and De Sica has openly
acknowledged his debt to Chaplin.
If there is any name which can be said to symbolize cinema—it is Charlie Chaplin… I am sure Chaplin’s
name will survive even if the cinema ceases to exist as a medium of artistic expression. Chaplin is truly
immortal.
Old masters like Chaplin, D.W. Griffith and Eisenstein aimed at a range of responses which the modern
film-makers do not even feel obliged to attempt.
As for innovation, all artists owe a debt to innovators and profit by such innovation. [Jean-Luc] Godard
gave me the courage to dispense largely with fades and dissolves, [François] Truffaut to use the freeze.
But all innovation is not external. There is a subtle, almost imperceptible kind of innovation that can be
felt in the very texture and sinews of a film. A film that doesn’t wear its innovations on its sleeve. A film
like La Règle du jour. Humanist? Classical? Avant-Garde? Contemporary? I defy anyone to give it a
label. This is the kind of innovation that appeals to me.
[On Jean-Luc Godard] Godard especially opened up new ways of… making points, let us say. And he
shook the foundations of film grammar in a very healthy sort of way, which is excellent.
If Godard has a hallmark, it is in repeated references to other directors, other films (both good and bad),
other forms of art, and to a myriad phenomena of contemporary life. These references do not congeal
into a single significant attitude, but merely reflect the alertness of Godard's mind, and the range and
variety of his interests.”
[On John Ford] A hallmark is never easy to describe, but the nearest description of Ford’s would be a
combination of strength and simplicity. The nearest equivalent I can think of is a musical one: middle-
period Beethoven."
[On Ingmar Bergman] It’s Bergman whom I continue to be fascinated by. I think he’s remarkable. I envy
his stock company, because given actors like that one could do extraordinary things.
On my first visit to Stockholm I was particularly keen to meet Bergman as I had been a great admirer of
his work ever since I saw The Seventh Seal way back in mid-fifties. Bergman of today is not the
Bergman of thirty years ago. He has pared down his style to a chamber music austerity. But he is still
capable of handling big subjects, as witness Fanny and Alexander. At the opposite and more
characteristic pole lies Scenes From A Marriage, a relentless study of two people — husband and wife
— compelling and exhaustive…

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Fritz Lang
[On Erich von Stroheim] In my opinion, there were only two directors in Hollywood who made films
without regard to box-office success: Von Stroheim and myself.
[At the funeral of F. W. Murnau] It is clear that the gods, so often jealous, wished it to be thus. They
favoured him more than other men and caused him to rise astonishingly quickly, which was all the more
surprising because he never aimed at success nor popularity nor wealth. Many centuries hence, everyone
would know that a pioneer had left us in the midst of his career, a man to whom the cinema owes its
fundamental character, artistically as well as technically. Murnau understood that the cinema, more than
the theatre, was called to present life as a symbol: all his works were like animated ballads, and one day
this idea would be triumphant....Let all sincere creators take the dead man as their example.... Aloha oe
Murnau.
[On Jean-Luc Godard] I like him a great deal: he is very honest, he loves the cinema, he is just as
fanatical as I was. In fact, I think he tries to continue what we started one day, the day when we began
making our first films. Only his approach is different. Not the spirit.
Peeping Tom
Michael Powell
My master in film, Buñuel, [Luis Buñuel] was a far greater storyteller than I. It was just that in my films
miracles occur on the screen.
Seventy years ago there were men like D.W. Griffith and seventy years later - now - there are not many
men like Martin Scorsese. But so long as there is one there will be others, and the art of the cinema will
survive.
Repulsion
Roman Polanski
[On François Truffaut, Claude Lelouch, and Jean-Luc Godard] People like Truffaut, Lelouch and
Godard are like little kids playing at being revolutionaries. I've passed through this stage. I lived in a
country where these things happened seriously.
In fact the worst thing possible is to be absolutely certain about things. Hitler, for example, must have
been convinced in the certainty of his ideas and that he was right. I don’t think he did anything without
believing in it, otherwise he wouldn’t have done it to start with. And I think Jean-Luc Godard believes
he makes good films, but maybe they aren’t that good.
[On Stanley Kubrick] We'd spend endless hours talking. I could see he was trying to understand my
feelings and I don't blame him for it. He's a very wise man.

3 Women
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Robert Altman
People talk about my signature. But I ask them if they ever saw Howard Hawks' films. They're filled
with overlapping dialog. Everything I've learned has come from watching other directors: Bergman
[Ingmar Bergman, Fellini [Federico Fellini], Kurosawa [Akira Kurosawa], Huston [John Huston] and
Renoir [Jean Renoir].
Naked Lunch
David Cronenberg
[On M. Night Shymalan] I HATE that guy! Next question.
[On Christopher Nolan] What he is doing is some very interesting technical stuff, which, you know, he's
shooting IMAX and in 3-D. That's really tricky and difficult to do. I read about it in American
Cinematography Magazine, and technically, that's all very interesting. The movies, to me, they're mostly
boring.
Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his
audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.
I never thought I was doing the same thing as directors like John Carpenter, George Romero, and
sometimes even Hitchcock, even though I've been sometimes compared to those other guys. We're after
different game.
I think I’m a more intimate and personal film-maker than Kubrick ever was. That’s why I find The
Shining not to be a great film. I don’t think he understood the [horror] genre. I don’t think he understood
what he was doing. There were some striking images in the book and he got that, but I don’t think he
really felt it.
He died too young, Stanley, and I'm sure he's absolutely pissed-off being dead. I think his movie (Eyes
Wide Shut) definitely was not finished, because he had the sound mix still to do and the looping with the
actors, where you add dialogue and so change performances. It's only people who don't know about
filmmaking who think it will be Stanley's movie because a huge part of it won't be. And I wonder who
the hell is finishing editing it. Are they going to get Spielberg? It did occur to me to finish it, especially
given the subject matter. It feels a little like Crash to me on one level. But I don't know that I'd want to be
in the middle of that. It could get very political. The answer for a filmmaker is ‘Don't die!'
I relate to Kubrick's intelligence and literacy, and there seems to be a dearth of that in filmmaking these
days, but I never thought of him as a comrade in arms. In terms of subject matter and methodology, I
think we were at far distant poles. Even the way he made movies is much more techno-obsessed than I
am. I don't think I'm techno-obsessed at all. I'm organic-obsessed. That's why my technology is all
organic. My understanding of technology is as an extension of the human body. So when people say,
‘Are your movies about a fear of technology?' I don't see that. I see technology as innately human. It
seems to be innate in us to create and so much of our creativity comes out as technological invention.
And I don't think of it as being outside ourselves. I think it's inside us first and then it's an extension of
us. And I don't get that from Kubrick's films.

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The Orphic
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Jean Cocteau
Orson Welles is a kind of giant with the look of a child, a tree filled with birds and shadow, a dog that
has broken its chain and lies down in the flower beds, an active idler, a wise madman, an island
surrounded by people, a pupil asleep in class, a strategist who pretends to be drunk when he wants to be
left in peace.
Following
Christopher Nolan
I have always been a huge fan of Ridley Scott and certainly when I was a kid. Alien (1979), Blade
Runner (1982) just blew me away because they created these extraordinary worlds that were just
completely immersive. I was also an enormous Stanley Kubrick fan for similar reasons.
Terrence Malick, more than almost any other filmmaker I can name, his work is immediately
recognizable. His films are all very, very connected with each other and they're very recognizably his
work, but it's very tough to put your finger on why that is or what you're seeing in that the technique is
not immediately obvious.
When you think of a visual style, when you think of the visual language of a film, there tends to be a
natural separation of the visual style and the narrative elements. But with the greats, whether it's Stanley
Kubrick or Terrence Malick or Hitchcock, what you're seeing is an inseparable, a vital relationship
between the image and the story it's telling.
The Last Emperor
Bernardo Bertolucci
[On the untimely death of Pier Paolo Pasolini] A remarkable director - a great loss to Italian culture. It
was as if he was discovering cinema from scratch.
Kurosawa's movies and La Dolce Vita (1960), Fellini, are the things that pushed me into being a film
director.
What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in
Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut,
Demy.
Frances Ha
Noah Baumbach
Truffaut loved [Alfred] Hitchcock. You feel there's something Go

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discovery in this movie [ Jules and Jim (1962)]. You're discovering this woman
18 captures 07 but there's discovery in
19 May the
2014 filmmaking,
- 7 Apr 2016 too. You get involved in the story even though Truffaut
2015 uses
2016narration
2017 and techniques
that might seem distancing. He knows exactly what he wants to show you, and he only uses the
voiceover when it's either going to get us further inside the characters or dispense with exposition. It
gives the movie a classical structure and puts it all in the past tense. This is a time that is now over. It's
both a celebration and an elegy.
[More on François Truffaut and Jules and Jim (1962)] Day for night in black and white is so cool. It was
practical because it's such a long shot and would have been difficult to light. Whatever the reason, there's
something so beautiful about this walk and talk; how they [Catherine and Jules] come toward us from
that distance, and we dolly with them. Truffaut doesn't need to cut in. He just sets it up so they'll come
closer. I love shots like that. If I could, I'd shoot everything that way. And the day for night makes it
beautiful in a way you can't define. It's familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
{On his friend Wes Anderson ] I saw that he really was doing what was interesting to him, and he was
trusting that that would be interesting to other people. I saw Rushmore (1998) and I thought, He's
comfortable making his own genre.
Brazil
Terry Gilliam
[On Federico Fellini and his film 8 1/2] Most people want to think life has got some structure, form and
that you can distinguish the past from the future, and the present. I don't think it's true, I think Fellini
admits to that and allows all of these things to enter into the process. Faces always coming at you - he's
got the money, he's got everything, but he doesn't know what he's doing and everyone's coming at him.
They're all wanting answers. They're all wanting something from him. I think one of the first times I was
really aware of the camera as a partner in dance, because I think the film is like a dance. He shoots like a
dancer would shoot. It's all moving, it's shifting. Things are coming in and out of frame. It's never still.
It's what life always seems like to me. It always feels like the passage through life.
I think Fellini just told me things about my future. He told me about the process of life. He told me things
about the process of life. He told me things about memory that all seems true and honest and believable,
even though he lies the whole time. That's what I love about Fellini, he's a liar. He's a constant liar. He
twists and distorts the truth.
Now whether any of us saw the world like Fellini showed us until he actually made his films I don't
know. I have that terrible feeling he opened our eyes to a world that was sitting there all alone. Those of
us who followed could come and see the world that he saw.
The great difference between Kubrick and Spielberg is - Spielberg is more successful. His films make
much more money. But they're comforting, they give you answers, always, the films are answers, and I
don't think they're very clever answers.
I think there's a side of me that's trying to compete with Lucas and Spielberg — I don't usually admit this
publicly — because I tend to think that they only go so far, and their view of the world is rather
simplistic. What I want to do is take whatever cinema is considered normal or successful at a particular
time and play around with it — to use it as a way of luring audiences in.

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Martin Scorsese
[On Stanley Kubrick] One of his films... is equivalent to ten of somebody else's. Watching a Kubrick
film is like gazing up at a mountain top. You look up and wonder, "How could anyone have climbed that
high?"
[On Stanley Kubrick] Why does something stay with you for so many years? It's really a person with a
very powerful storytelling ability. A talent... a genius, who could create a solid rock image that has
conviction.
In other words, we’re all the children of D.W. Griffith and Stanley Kubrick.
[On Stanley Kubrick] There's many ways I look at his films, besides the big screen. I like watching them
on the television. I like watching them with the sound off. Sometimes you can see the rhythm of the
cutting and the camera moves...and when he cuts in a two shot conversation and when he destroys the
invisible line and when the cut gets tighter...on which line of dialogue.
Stanley Kubrick was one of the only modern masters we had.
The last frontier may be sexuality and beyond sexuality the complexity of the human psyches. This is the
territory that Stanley Kubrick has minded in his films, like Kazan, Kubrick was a New York rebel that
converted into an iconoclast. He emerged from independent productions and film noir to create his own
unique visionary worlds. His association with Kirk Douglas on Paths of Glory and Spartacus established
him as a mayor player, but he couldn't stand being an employee on studio projects and moved to London
to make Lolita. He stayed there and hasn't worked in Hollywood since. He is one of the rare iconoclasts
who has enjoyed the luxury of operating completely on his own terms.
If Kubrick had lived to see the opening of his final film, he obviously would have been disappointed by
the hostile reactions. But I’m sure that in the end he would have taken it with a grain of salt and moved
on. That’s the lot of all true visionaries, who don’t see the use of working in the same vein as everyone
else. Artists like Kubrick have minds expansive and dynamic enough to picture the world in motion, to
comprehend not just where its been, but where it’s going.
[On Kathryn Bigelow] I've always been a fan of hers, over the years. (Her film) Blue Steel (1989). She's
good, she's really good.
[On Akira Kurosawa] His influence on filmmakers throughout the entire world is so profound as to be
almost incomparable,.
[On Akira Kurosawa] The term 'giant' is used too often to describe artists. But in the case of Akira
Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.
Let me say it simply: Akira Kurosawa was my master, and ... the master of so many other filmmakers
over the years.
L'Avventura (1960) gave me one of the most profound shocks I've ever had at the movies, greater even
than Breathless (1960) or Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). Or La Dolce Vita (1960). At the time there
were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked L'Avventura. I knew I
was firmly on Antonioni's side of the line, but if you'd asked me at the time, I'm not sure I would have
been able to explain why. I loved Fellini's pictures and I admired La Dolce Vita, but I was challenged by
L' Avventura. Fellini's film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni's film changed my perception
of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless.
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and by Antonioni's subsequent films, and it was the fact that they were unresolved in any conventional
sense that kept
19 May 2014 - 7 Apr 2016 drawing me back. They posed mysteries - or rather the
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are, to each other, to ourselves, to time. You could say that Antonioni was looking directly at the
mysteries of the soul. That's why I kept going back. I wanted to keep experiencing these pictures,
wandering through them. I still do.
[On Federico Fellini and his film 81/2] What would Fellini do after La dolce vita? We all wondered.
How would he top himself? Would he even want to top himself? Would he shift gears? Finally, he did
something that no one could have anticipated at the time. He took his own artistic and life situation—that
of a filmmaker who had eight and a half films to his name (episodes for two omnibus films and a shared
credit with Alberto Lattuada on Variety Lights counted for him as one and a half films, plus seven),
achieved international renown with his last feature and felt enormous pressure when the time came for a
follow-up—and he built a movie around it.
Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema.
[On Francois Truffaut] His love affair with moving pictures was a profound and lasting one, and you can
feel the intensity of it in his criticism, even in his acting. And most of all, in his films. Truffaut's passion
for cinema, the desire that it stirred in him, animates every movie he ever made, every scene, every shot...
Truffaut carried that sense of history into his moviemaking. Back in the early and mid-'60s, people were
always talking about how this movie "quoted" from that older movie, but what almost no one talked
about was why the quote was there, what it did or didn't do for the movie, what it meant emotionally to
the picture as a whole. In Truffaut, you could feel the awareness of film history behind the camera, but
you could also see that every single choice he made was grounded in the emotional reality of the
picture...
In Truffaut, you could feel the awareness of film history behind the camera, but you could also see that
every single choice he made was grounded in the emotional reality of the picture. There are many echoes
of Hitchcock in his movies, blatantly so in The Soft Skin (underrated at the time of its release, and a
favorite of mine) and The Bride Wore Black, not so blatantly in many other movies, and it's almost
impossible to quantify the importance of Jean Renoir to Truffaut (or, for that matter, of Henry James, of
Honoré de Balzac—Truffaut was also a great reader). But if you look at those movies carefully, you will
see that there's nothing extraneous or superficial.
There are things that Truffaut did in those early movies that left a lasting impression: the opening
expository section of Jules and Jim, where time and space is abolished and the images flow like music
across the screen; the series of shots from Fahrenheit 451 (another underrated picture) where the camera
moves in close-closer-closest on a character in imminent danger, which I admit I've duplicated many
times in my own films. And the character played by Charles Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player, who
keeps almost acting but never does until it's too late, had a profound effect on me, and on many other
filmmakers.
Time—the desire to slow it down coupled with the harsh reality of its swift passing ... Truffaut had a
great gift for giving form to this sensation. In a way, it's all encapsulated in a moment near the end of
Two English Girls—yet another underrated picture, this time a masterpiece—where Jean-Pierre Léaud's
character suddenly glances at himself in the mirror and murmurs the words: "My God, I look old." And
then that moment is over. That's life. And that's Truffaut.
If you don’t like Sam Fuller you just don’t like cinema.
Theo Angelopoulos is a masterful filmmaker. He really understands how to control the frame. There are
sequences in his work—the wedding scene in The Suspended Step of the Stork; the rape scene in
Landscape in the Mist; or any given scene in The Traveling Players—where

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go OCT APRthe slightest movement,
MAY
👤 the
18 captures 07
slightest change in distance, sends reverberations through the film and through the viewer. The total
effect is hypnotic,
19 May 2014 - 7 Apr 2016 sweeping, and profoundly emotional. His sense of control
2015 2016is 2017
almost otherworldly.
When I hear the term ‘independent filmmaker,’ I immediately think of John Cassavetes. He was the most
independent of them all. For me, he was and still is a guide and teacher. Without his support and advice, I
don’t know what would have become of me as a filmmaker.
Nothing could have stopped Cassavetes except God, and He eventually did. John died much too soon,
but his films and his example are still very much alive.
Wes Anderson, at age thirty, has a very special kind of talent: He knows how to convey the simple joys
and interactions between people so well and with such richness. This kind of sensibility is rare in movies.
Leo McCarey, the director of Make Way for Tomorrow and The Awful Truth, comes to mind. And so
does Jean Renoir. I remember seeing Renoir's films as a child and immediately feeling connected to the
characters through his love for them. It's the same with Anderson. I've found myself going back and
watching Bottle Rocket several times. I'm also very fond of his second film, Rushmore (1998)--it has the
same tenderness, the same kind of grace. Both of them are very funny, but also very moving.
[On Kenji Mizoguchi] Mizoguchi is one of the greatest masters who ever worked in the medium of film;
he’s right up there with Renoir and Murnau and Ford, and after the war he made three pictures—The
Life of Oharu, Ugetsu, and Sansho the Bailiff—that stand at the summit of cinema. All of his artistry is
channeled into the most extraordinary simplicity.
I’ve crossed paths with Andrzej Wajda a few times over the years, and I’ve always been in awe of his
energy and his unflinching vision. I saw him again a couple of years ago, a little frailer but still as
burning with energy as he’d been back in the ’90s, and he was preparing to make another film, now just
completed, about Lech Walesa (the final installment of the trilogy that began with Man of Marble and
Man of Iron). He’s a model to all filmmakers.
[On Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni] I used to think of Godard and Antonioni as the
great modern visual artists of cinema—great colorists who composed frames the way painters composed
their canvases. I still think so, but I also connect with them on the emotional level.
[On Roberto Rossellini] He changed cinema three times. First, he and Vittorio De Sica started what was
called 'neorealism.' Then, with his wife Ingrid Bergman, he made a series of intimate, almost mystical
stories like Stromboli and Europa '51. Europa '51 is about two people in a car--it's what became the New
Wave of cinema in the '60s. At the end of his career, he directed a series of didactic films for Italian
television-- he always felt a duty to inform. He called these 'undramatic,' but The Rise of Louis XIV is
an artistic masterpiece.
[On Ingmar Bergman] I guess I’d put it like this: if you were alive in the ’50s and the ’60s and of a
certain age, a teenager on your way to becoming an adult, and you wanted to make films, I don’t see
how you couldn’t be influenced by Bergman. You would have had to make a conscious effort, and even
then, the influence would have snuck through.
My Night at Maud’s
Eric Rohmer
Griffith, [Victor] Sjöström, the German expressionists,

Chaplin,
https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go[Abel]
OCTGance,
APR MAYand Eisenstein👤have, in
their own ways, created languages that proved to be almost as expressive,07
as rich, and as supple as
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19 May spoken
2014 - 7 Aprlanguage.
2016 2015 2016 2017 ▾ About this capture
Alain Resnais is a cubist. I mean that he is the first modern filmmaker of the sound film. There were
many modern filmmakers in silent films: Eisenstein, the Expressionists, and Dreyer too. But I think that
sound films have perhaps been more classical than silents.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Paul Schrader
[On Stanley Kubrick] Every time out of the box he had a different dance.
I would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar
Bergman. What he has left is a legacy greater than any other director. I think the extraordinary thing that
Bergman will be remembered for, other than his body of work, was that he probably did more than
anyone to make cinema a medium of personal and introspective value.
Che
Steven Soderbergh
There are certain directors - Spielberg, David Fincher, John McTiernan - who sort of see things in three
dimensions, and I was watching their films and sort of breaking them down to see how they laid
sequences out, and how they paid attention to things like lens length, where the eyelines were, when the
camera moved, how they cut, how they led your eye from one part of the frame to another.
[On Shane Carruth] I view Shane as the illegitimate offspring of David Lynch and James Cameron.
I learned from Richard Lester that as your career goes on, you learn more about how things can go
wrong, but you never learn how things can go right. And it's really disorienting.
The Devil’s Backbone
Guillermo del Toro
[On Stanley Kubrick] I admire Kubrick greatly. He is often accused of being a prodigious technician and
rigid intellectual, which people say makes his films very cold. I don't agree. I think that "Barry Lyndon"
or "A Clockwork Orange" are the most perfect marriages of personality and subject. But in fact, "Full
Metal Jacket" is even more so. It looked at rigidity and brutality with an almost clinical eye. It is, for me,
a singular film about the military, about war and its consequences. The famous scenes, like the induction
with R Lee Ermey where he renames the soldiers and reshapes them into sub-human maggots, had a
particular impact on me. Also the suicide scene with Vincent D'Onofrio in the bathroom. And the sniper
set-piece at the end. Those are absolutely virtuoso pieces of filmmaking.
Stanley Kubrick''s absolute control over the medium turns

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors his rock-solid
Go OCT framing
APR MAYand tense timing
👤 into
real weapons pointed directly at the unsuspecting audience of The Shining
18 captures 07(1980). No one has ever used
19 May the
2014 Steadicam
- 7 Apr 2016 as perfectly as he did in the tracking shots behind Torrance, Danny's
2015 2016 2017 tricycle. Hethis
▾ About uses the
capture
soundtrack brilliantly, fusing concrete music with sound effects and score to unsettle and position the
uber-mannered, hyper-real performances of his actors. And, refreshingly, Kubrick is not above moments
of Grand Guignol: the elevator doors spilling blood, the axe on the chest, the Grady twins bathed in
blood or the old undead crone festering in the bathtub. He proves that great horror can be both shocking
and a highly artistic endeavor.
Kubrick was a fearsome intellect. His approach to filmmaking and storytelling remains as mysterious at it
is compelling. The illusion of control over the medium is total. Both films speak eloquently about the
scale of a man against the tide of history, and both raise the bar for every “historical” film to follow. Paths
of Glory is a searing indictment of the war machine, as pertinent now as it was in its day. I suspect,
however, that Kubrick was also a highly instinctive director, and that he grasped incessantly for his films.
An anecdote tells us of him begging Kirk Douglas to stay in bed a few more days after an accident,
because Kubrick was using the “downtime” to understand the film they were making.
[On Akira Kurosawa] How he managed to be both exuberant and elegant at the same time will be one of
life’s great mysteries.
Terry Gilliam is a living treasure, and we are squandering him foolishly with every film of his that
remains unmade. Proof that our world is the poorer for this can be found in two of his masterpieces.
Gilliam is a fabulist pregnant with images—exploding with them, actually—and fierce, untamed
imagination. He understands that “bad taste” is the ultimate declaration of independence from the discreet
charm of the bourgeoisie. He jumps with no safety net and drags us with him into a world made coherent
only by his undying faith in the tale he is telling.
[On Alfonso Cuarón] I’ve known Alfonso for a quarter of a century, so roughly half my life. I’ve seen
his talent grow and mature, and I’ve seen him transform as an artist and as a human being. This parallel
growth is not accidental — Alfonso’s films push the technical and artistic boundaries in search of one
thing: the human spirit.
He probes the emotional connection with the material at hand and then, and only then, does he define the
technical challenge to bringing those emotions home. Like any great illusionist, he works indefatigably
on the illusion; he hones the sleight of hand through countless hours until the illusion seems effortless …
and real. Through the years, Alfonso has mastered the unbroken link between film and audience.
La vie de bohème
Aki Kaurismäki
[On Robert Bresson] I want to make him seem like a director of epic action pictures.
I have always considered Jean Vigo and Robert Flaherty close relatives. Between Nanook and
L’Atalante, you can place practically all cinema except Bunuel’s L’age d’or.
Red River
Howard Hawks
When [John Ford] was dying, we used to discuss

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors how tough itGo
was OCT
to make
APRa good
MAY Western 👤
without
[John Wayne].
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Frank Capra, until he went into the army, was one of the greatest directors we ever had. Made great
entertainment. After that he couldn't make anything. He started to analyze his pictures, and put messages
in them. He put messages into his other pictures, but he didn't think about it. He did it naturally. When he
got to thinking about his messages, oh brother, he turned into really... ah, no good.
An Angel at My Table
Jane Campion
[On Luis Buñuel and That Obscure Object of Desire] Buñuel is my first deep love in cinema. He is the
adult that pulled the plug on the human art of pretending. He blazes through the hypocrisy at the heart of
our bourgeois lives mercilessly—no one is sacred, no ideal or moral is spared. He is perfectly modern,
bold, and clear. I found myself laughing in joy and amazement. He understands human nature while
refusing to sentimentalize it.
No one today is as modern as Godard. There has never been a more daring conceptual, chic, and
irreverent filmmaker.
Fellini is a deep, deep master of film. As time goes by I adore him more and more.
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Wes Anderson
Mike Nichols said in the newspaper he thinks of Buñuel every day, which I believe I do, too, or at least
every other.
Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa
Pedro Costa
Luis Buñuel always reminds us of what we’re constantly losing in this rotten society.
In his top ten, Jean-Pierre Gorin tells you about John Ford’s praise of Jean Renoir. I’ll try to top his story:
One day, Mizoguchi was asked who his favorite filmmaker was. “Ozu,” he answered without hesitation.
And the journalist asked him why. “Because what he does is much more difficult than what I do.”
When everything seems hopeless and lost, Dr. Lubitsch is the one to call.
My friend Shigehiko Hasumi told me that Naruse was a very silent man because he had the feeling the
world had betrayed him. Naruse was one of the greatest craftsmen of all time, a man who always spoke
softly about our weaknesses.

👤
The Silence
18 captures of the Lambs 07
Jonathan Demme
I also love the absence of pressure, any kind of pressure, with documentaries. I know what Roger
Corman's talking about when he says that a director has to be part businessman.
[On Roger Corman] Roger also said something I'll never forget. He said that as far as he was concerned
the formula for a director was 40 per cent artist, 60 per cent businessman. He also had a little pat speech
that he'd give you before you did your first directing job, a lot of really good rules - stuff that most movie
goers know anyway - just ways to keep the eye entertained, the value of well-motivated camera
movement... that kind of thing. He was great. We called it the Roger Corman school of film technique.
You really did learn on the job.
I think that a lot of the people, like Hal Ashby, were a lot more complicated and there was a lot more
magic going on in their lives and their work than the book indicated.
Heaven’s Gate
Michael Cimino
Vilmos [Zsigmond] and all those guys have built themselves up to be bigger than directors. It's bullshit.
Does anyone remember who shot Kubrick's movies? Do you remember who shot David Lean's movies?
No one remembers who shot Dr. Strangelove or Barry Lyndon (1975).
I'm not revisiting the past, like Francis Coppola, re-cutting Apocalypse Now (1979) 29 times. Why do
you think Francis is re-cutting Apocalypse? He's dried up. I'm going forward; he's going backward.
[On Oliver Stone] Oliver thinks he's the greatest thing since chopped liver. He's a great guy, a great
writer; we have a great working relationship and I love him. But he's a better writer than director. He's
incredibly, insanely jealous about the fact that I published a novel. He's always wanted to be the next
Hemingway; he didn't want to be a director.
Ace in the Hole
Billy Wilder
[On being asked about his "How Would Lubitsch do it?" sign above his office door] When I would
write a romantic comedy along the Lubitschian line, if I got stopped in the middle of a scene, I’d think,
How would Lubitsch do it?
[At the funeral of Ernst Lubitsch] No more Lubitsch.
Lubitsch could do more with a closed door than another director could do with an open fly.
Kubrick was a wonderful director. I love all his movies. These are pictures any director would be proud
to be associated with, much less to make.

Ali: Fear
18 captures Eats the Soul 07
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
[On Douglas Sirk] Yes, actually ever since I saw his films and tried to write about them, Sirk's been in
everything I've done. Not Sirk himself, but what I've learned from his work.
Women think in [Douglas] Sirk’s films. Something which has never struck me with other directors. None
of them. Usually women are always reacting, doing what women are supposed to do, but in Sirk they
think. It’s something that has to be seen. It’s great to see women think. It gives one hope. Honestly.
The Game
David Fincher
I think that with Malick you're seeing something that was thought about and meditated over and you're
seeing somebody who's making choices that are specifically designed to evoke a feeling.
I have a philosophy about the two extremes of filmmaking. The first is the "Kubrick way," where you're
at the end of an alley in which four guys are kicking the shit out of a wino. Hopefully, the audience
members will know that such a scenario is morally wrong, even though it's not presented as if the viewer
is the one being beaten up; it's more as if you're witnessing an event. Inversely, there's the "Spielberg
way," where you're dropped into the middle of the action and you're going to live the experience
vicariously - not only through what's happening, but through the emotional flow of what people are
saying. It's a much more involved style. I find myself attracted to both styles at different times, but mostly
I'm interested in just presenting something and letting people decide for themselves what they want to
look at.
The Last Picture Show
Peter Bogdanovich
[On making The Last Picture Show (1971)] I hope I'm not repeating what happened to [Orson Welles].
You know, make a successful serious film like this early and then spend the rest of my life in decline.
[On Orson Welles] Welles was an astute and worldly man about everything but his art. He couldn't
afford to be otherwise.
I asked Jean Renoir once what he thought of Lubitsch. Renoir said “Lubitsch? He invented the modern
Hollywood.”
Harakiri
Masaki Kobayashi
There was a time when we all considered America to be a great

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Gocountry. That was
OCT APR MAY during my👤student
days. We were seeing all these fantastic American movies then. In our youth,
18 captures 07 the only access we had to
19 May the
2014 world was through the cinema; a kind of golden age of film. You
- 7 Apr 2016 had2016
2015 Frank2017
Capra, John Ford,
▾ About and
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many other brilliant filmmakers. I was deeply influenced by the movies those directors made. And their
movies all portrayed the American common man - what was best about the middle class. We were
deeply drawn to American movies, marvelling at the existence of such a bright world, free of restrictions.
But movies the world over were great during those years. Yes, we were deeply stimulated by such
movies in our youth.
[On his view of Akira Kurosawa's place in Japanese film] Kurosawa-san's works have had a tremendous
impact on Japanese filmmaking. We cannot think or talk of Japanese film without him. I don't agree with
those who say that his films have no direct connection with present-day Japan. They certainly have. I
should say this, however. The present Japanese film industry placed him in a position where he could not
create effectively. They ostracized him. I hold the opinion that Kurosawa-san is still capable of producing
major films--now and in the future. He is an indeed a great artist. Oshima has been mentioned by many
as a new Japanese filmmaker who has a finger on the pulse of modern Japan; I myself consider him a
political figure rather then an artist, a filmmaker. I think Oshima will have many future problems in his
filmmaking.
[On whether there are any American directors that he admires or have influenced him] So many of them.
Too many. But I can say that while I was a university student, I saw many films by Renoir, Duvivier,
Rene Clair, and the Americans Frank Capra and Wyler. This must have been around Showa 15 or 16
[1940 or 1941 on our calendar] So I can say that I must have been influenced by them. I still think of
there work with a bit of nostalgia. But in the end, an artist must rely on himself; you cannot depend on
anybody. It is a very lonely, solitary existence. Last year I went to the Cannes Film Festival and met
Charles Chaplin. They showed some of his works. I was deeply impressed by his greatness. His films,
his methods and content, are modern and so contemporary. He is a great genius.
Fish Tank
Andrea Arnold
Mainly it's just real life around me that inspires me. I see someone on the bus, and I want to write about
them. But among filmmakers, I suppose Tarkovsky. He has something spiritual about him. His book
'Sculpting in Time' is on my bedside table.
Jubilee
Derek Jarman
[On Peter Greenaway] If Gucci handbags were still in fashion Greenaway would carry his scripts in
them.
I think of the area of magic as a metaphor for the homosexual situation. You know, magic which is
banned and dangerous, difficult and mysterious. I can see that use of magic in the Cocteau films, in
Kenneth Anger and very much in Eisenstein. Maybe it is an uncomfortable, banned area which is
disruptive, and maybe it is a metaphor for the gay situation.

Tie Me
18 captures Up! Tie Me Down! 07
Pedro Almodóvar
[On Luis Buñuel] We have the same roots, we belong to the same family and I really recognise myself in
his films. For me, he is a real master.
I can get a lot of pleasure from a screening of Pink Flamingos (1972) by John Waters, and at the same
time a Bergman movie, like Face to Face (1976) or Persona (1966). When I was a child, I remember
very well that I saw a film by Michelangelo Antonioni. I was at school at the time, about 11 or 12, and I
was deeply interested. But at the same time I saw silly pop movies that I liked too, because I was a child.
I always combined these two tastes in my life.
I'm a big fan of David Lean. I think David Lean is the only example of a filmmaker who made super-
productions that were auteur super-productions. They're extremely personal. And I don't think anyone's
making films like that, and I really miss a personality like David Lean's in Hollywood.
Kiss Me Deadly
Robert Aldrich
[On Lewis Milestone] From Lewis Milestone I learned diplomacy in dealing with actors.
[On Charles Chaplin, for whom he worked as assistant director on Limelight (1952)] He's the greatest
actor in the world but he doesn't know how to direct.
White Material
Claire Denis
I had this unimaginable chance to work for Jacques Rivette. It took me many years to appreciate the
New Wave: Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard, I found them sectarian. The only one who seemed absolutely
incredible to me was Rivette.
Seconds
John Frankenheimer
[On Alfred Hitchcock] Any American director who says he hasn't been influenced by him is out of his
mind.
[On Alfred Hitchcock] When I say I have been influenced by Hitchcock, I think every director in a
certain way has been influenced by Hitchcock, because in many of his films, you find those marvellous
moments; but I've never been fulfilled by a Hitchcock film. I would certainly never want to be
Hitchcock, and would never want to make films like his because I think they're meaningless. I think all
those kind of "after the fact" and "in depth" studies

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors of HitchcockGo are ludicrous.
OCT APR MAY If ever there was
👤 a
commercial director, it was Hitchcock. He's terribly good, but also terribly07 glib and really a very surface
18 captures
19 May director.
2014 - 7 Apr I don't think his films contain deep motivations. It's very easy
2016 2015to 2016
read things
2017 into▾certain films.
About this capture
He's a clever man and gifted and I often think of what he could have achieved if his talents had been
directed toward something more meaningful.
Thief
Michael Mann
As filmmakers, we want the audience to have the most complete experience they can. For example, I
interviewed Stanley Kubrick years ago around the time of '2001: A Space Odyssey.' I was going to see
the film that night in London, and he insisted I sit in one of four seats in the theater for the best view or
not watch the film.
Could I have worked under a system where there were Draconian controls on my creativity, meaning
budget, time, script choices, etc.? Definitely not. I would have fared poorly under the old studio system
that guys like Howard Hawks did so well in. I cannot.
The Horse’s Mouth
Ronald Neame
[on David Lean] If he heard his best friend was dying while he was on the set, I doubt if he'd take it in.
Once he's started a film, there's really nothing else in his life.
[On Alexander Korda] I once had a meeting with him. I remember thinking, Korda can make you think
black is white, or white is black that he would say at a meeting, "Well, you see, black is white, Ronnie."
And you'd say, "Yes, yes." And then halfway up Brook Street after you'd left, you'd say, "Well, no.
That's not so. Black isn't white."
Faces
John Cassavetes
When I was a kid, Frank Capra was certainly America to me. In terms of today’s directors I think Marty
Scorsese is phenomenal and singular. I very much like Don Siegel for what he does, and also Peter
Bogdanovich, Melvin Van Peebles, Shirley Clarke, Michelangelo Antonioni, Sidney Lumet, and
certainly Elaine May. In a way, I admire them all: each picture is different, every person has a different
strength. When it comes right down to it, I admire anyone who can make a film.
The Hit
Stephen Frears
I never expected to become a director. It never occurred

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors to me Go
to come
OCTtoAPRAmerica,
MAY to Hollywood.
👤 It's all
been a wonderful accident. I'm still amazed every time I finish a film. I'm 07 the opposite of Steven
18 captures
19 May (Spielberg)
2014 - 7 Apr 2016who's obsessed about making films since he was a child. It's all
2015 2016come as a surprise;
2017 I'mcapture
▾ About this
finding my way through the dark.
La haine
Mathieu Kassovitz
I don't know if it's really important, or intelligent even, when people say to me I'm a white Spike Lee,
because they said to Spike Lee you're a black Woody Allen.
PlayTime
Jacques Tati
[On Charles Chaplin] Without him I would never have made a film.
You won't find another Chaplin, you won't find another Keaton, because the school is closed.
The Ice Storm
Ang Lee
For me the filmmaker Bergman is the greatest actor of all. His vision and his filmic force, the thing that
the Frenchmen call auteur. What Kurosawa and Fellini also have — but to me Bergman is number one!
Yesterday I wore a particular shirt, which was Kubrick's favourite shirt. His last picture was costumed by
an English costume designer who I used three times. She passed away a couple of years ago, but she
said Kubrick had seven sets of this particular shirt. He'd only wear that shirt every day, so she made one
for me and I love it. I just worship Kubrick.
Le beau Serge
Claude Chabrol
The influence of Hitchcock for me has been exaggerated, I have enjoyed his films very much and
learned very much. But others have influenced me more. My three greatest influences were Murnau, the
great silent-film director. I believe his ‘Sunrise’ is the most beautiful film ever made. Then there is Ernst
Lubitsch and Fritz Lang.
The Killer
John Woo
18 captures 07
19 May [On
2014 - Akira Kurosawa] I love Kurosawa's movies, and I got so much2015
7 Apr 2016 inspiration from him.
2016 2017 He isthis
▾ About one of
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my idols and one of the great masters.
[The following is excerpts taken from John Woo's tribute essay The Melville Style, released in the 1996
cahiers du cinema November issue]
Melville is God to me.
What Melville and I have in common is a love for old American gangster films. Although Melville was
basically doing gangster films, the big difference between his work and the American films of that period
was in his almost intellectual approach to the genre. Although they’re shot in a very cold way, Melville’s
films always make us react emotionally. Melville is very self-controlled when he tells a story, and I find
this fascinating. In my films, when I want to convey an emotion, I always use a lot of shots, extreme
close-ups sometimes combined with dollies. On the contrary, Melville shoots in an almost static way,
letting the actors deliver their performance, and thus allowing the audience to fully experience what is
going on in each scene. As a result, his films are both psychologically and intellectually extremely
involving.
I love how Melville managed to combine his own culture with Eastern philosophy. And that’s why the
Hong Kong audience was so responsive to his movies. Melville often used Eastern proverbs in the
opening titles of his films. He understood Chinese philosophy even more than our own people. I think
that I relate to his movies because his vision of humanity is so rooted in the Eastern tradition. His
characters are not heroes; they are human beings. In the gang world, they have to stick to the rules, but
they remain faithful to a code of honor that is reminiscent of ancient chivalry. In Melville’s films, there’s
always a thin line between good and evil. His characters are unpredictable. You never know what
they’re going to do next, but it’s always bigger than life. You cannot use any formula, any moral
standards, to sum up his heroes.
I believe that this connection I have with Melville also has to do with the fact that I was influenced by
existentialism in the fifties and sixties. To me, Melville’s movies are existentialist, as you find in the
loneliness of the characters played by Yves Montand in Le Cercle Rouge and Alain Delon in Le
Samouraï. Nobody cares for them, nobody knows who they are; they are loners, doomed tragic figures,
lost on their inner journey.
Technically, I love the way Melville builds the tension before the action. I’m thinking of that scene on the
bridge in Le Samouraï, where Delon has a meeting with a man who is supposed to give him money, but
the whole thing is a trap. They both wait on the bridge. They’re walking toward each other, and nothing
really happens, but there’s this dangerous feel throughout the scene, which is terrific. Suddenly, Melville
cuts to a wide shot, you hear a gunshot, and he cuts back to Alain Delon, who is already wounded. In
classic genre scenes of this type, you’d usually have a different setup, with a huge gunfight at the end.
Melville prefers to play this in a very subdued, almost poetic, way.
In 1988-89, during the promotion of The Killer, I remember talking to the press and saying that the film
was a tribute to Melville, and I was shocked to find that almost nobody had heard about him or Le
Samouraï. To my great surprise, the young generation did not know about him.
Now, Melville is the new big thing, maybe because people like Quentin Tarantino and me often talk
about him. Whenever I am at a film festival, I always mention Melville’s name, and I guess that has
aroused some interest in him. When I toured the United States with The Killer, I was amazed to see that
the American film buffs knew so much about Melville.
Whoever watches Melville’s movies will realize

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Paris, Texas
Wim Wenders
If in our century, something sacred still existed, if there were something like a sacred treasure of the
cinema, then for me that would have to be the work of the Japanese director Yasujirô Ozu… For me
never before and never again since has the cinema been so close to its essence and its purpose: to present
an image of man in our century, a usable, true and valid image in which he not only recognises himself,
but from which, above all, he may learn about himself.
Ozu's work does not need my praise and such a sacred treasure of the cinema could only reside in the
realm of the imagination. And so, my trip to Tokyo was in no way a pilgrimage. I was curious as to
whether I still could track down something from this time, whether there was still anything left of this
work. Images perhaps, or even people… Or whether so much would have changed in Tokyo in the
twenty years since Ozu's death that nothing would be left to find.
[On Jean-Luc Godard] For me, discovering cinema was directly connected to his films. I was living in
Paris at the time. When Made in USA opened, I went to the first show—it was around noon—and I sat
there until midnight. I saw it six times in a row.
I was very privileged to start in the 70s, and really make a film a year for 10 years. The only living
person who's still doing that is Woody Allen. He has a machinery going; writing in the winter, prepping
in the spring, shooting in the summer, editing in the fall. He has it down. But he's the only living person
who's still doing that.
Mamma Roma
Pier Paolo Pasolini
[On Federico Fellini] Though not as great as Chaplin, Eisenstein or Mizoguchi, Fellini is unquestionably
an author rather than a director.
You can always feel underneath my love for Dreyer, Mizoguchi and Chaplin… I feel this mythic
epicness in both Dreyer and Mizoguchi and Chaplin: all three see things from a point of view which is
absolute, essential and in a certain way holy, reverential.
Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee
I’m not against the word, and I use it, but not excessively. And some people speak that way. But,
Quentin [Quentin Tarantino] is infatuated with that word. What does he want to be made — an honorary
black man?
Any film I do is not going to change the way blackwomen have

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OCTportrayed,
APR MAY or black people
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Eclipse Series 31: Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin
Jean-Pierre Gorin
When asked to name a filmmaker who interested him, John Ford answered, “Renoir.” Pressed to name
one film, he growled, “All of it.” Time to return the compliment: “John Ford . . . All of it,”
[On John Cassavetes] Looking at a Cassavetes movie should persuade any viewer that there are no bad
actors but only bad directors, and that acting has more to do with the strategic setting of gestures in space
than it has to do with a trip to the flea market of emotions. The miracle of Cassavetes’s craft lies in that he
makes the emotion surge, while obstinately refusing to illustrate it. No wonder his actors look always as
if they were documented.
Eraserhead
David Lynch
I also like Stanley Kubrick. I think right now he’s about the coolest, I guess. The Shining really grew on
me. I never miss it when it’s on cable. His best film for me, though, is Lolita. I’m absolutely captivated
by it. Also, I like him because he likes Eraserhead. He said at one time that it was his favorite film.
I have a profound admiration for Fellini. I met him lately and he’s just fantastic. I feel very close to him
even though he’s very Italian. But his films could have been made in every country. When I say, I feel
close to him, then also because we’re both born on January 20th.
[On Federico Fellini] I love Fellini. And we’ve got the same birthday, so if you believe in astrology . . .
His is a totally different time, and an Italian take on life. But there’s something about his films. There’s a
mood. They make you dream. They’re so magical and lyrical and surprising and inventive. The guy was
unique. If you took his films away, there would be a giant chunk of cinema missing. There’s nothing else
around like that. I like Bergman, but his films are so different. Sparse. Sparse dreams.
[Jacques Tati] I love that guy. His whole style, and how he sees things. And again, you know, the guy’s
an inventor visually, and with the sound, choreography, and music. Then there’s his childlike love of his
characters; I really dig it. I met his daughter. But, you know, I hear these stories, how he died a bitter man
and he wasn’t really that loved in his own country. And it kills me.
Revanche
Götz Spielmann
[On Yasujiro Ozu] On Ozu’s gravestone is the word mu, which in Japanese means “emptiness.” For me,
emptiness and silence are very familiar, important family members, and I think the forms come out of
emptiness. In the way Ozu makes movies, I feel deeply aware of emptiness. There is something very
wise, quiet, and powerful in it. So Ozu for me is like a big brother
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APR me remember from
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[On John Cassavetes] Cassavetes’ movies to me are a kind of pure energy. He’s the very opposite of Ozu
because he cared nothing at all about form. Yet for some strange reason, by not caring about form at all
—he just went for it—this produced, in formal aspects, the same result as when you pay a lot of attention
to form. His energy with actors can also be felt. In each shot, you can feel what he wants to tell us about
story, and you get the feeling that this has to be acted now, shot in the very moment. I would say it’s
possibly something very American. This pure energy of making is very American, and it’s very
optimistic.
The Long Day Closes
Terence Davies
All my films, up to and including The House of Mirth, were made with very small budgets and modest
intentions. We all started out at the BFI. There was me, Bill Douglas, Derek Jarman, Sally Potter, Peter
Greenaway. It was all modest, but all those people had a voice in a way that people haven't today.
I don't regard Bergman as a religious film-maker. I think he's an atheist and he's saying there's nothing
beyond this life. But that doesn't stop him from being spiritual and humanist.
12 Angry Men
Sidney Lumet
[On Akira Kurosawa] Kurosawa never affected me directly in terms of my own movie-making because I
never would have presumed that I was capable of that perception and that vision.
Commercial success has no relation to a good or bad picture. Good pictures become hits. Good pictures
become flops. Bad pictures make money, bad pictures lose money. The fact is that NO ONE REALLY
KNOWS. Through some incredible talent, Walt Disney knew. Today Steven Spielberg seems to.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Chantal Akerman
[On Jean-Luc Godard] You can see him excluding himself from the world in an almost autistic manner.
For people like me, who started doing film because of him, it is a terrible fright. And the fact that the
long evolution that Godard has been through can lead to this, almost brings me to despair. He was kind
of a pioneer, an inventor who didn’t care much about anybody or anything. And that a man at this stage
of his life isolates himself, should also be a lesson for us other film makers.

À nous
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René Clair
Nothing essential has been added to the art of the motion picture since D.W. Griffith.
[On Charlie Chaplin] He inspired practically every filmmaker.
My Own Private Idaho
Gus Van Sant
Kubrick was a good model. He had an autonomy I've never had but that one desire. He organized things
a certain way. And he had a good relationship with Warner Brothers. He was their class act.
Tootsie
Sydney Pollack
[On Stanley Kubrick] People say he had these phobias, he wouldn't go here and wouldn't go there. The
truth is he lived in a paradise -- there wasn't any reason for him to go anywhere. It was a kind of a
heaven.
[On Stanley Kubrick] I always think of Stanley literally on the edge of a smile. His eyes always had
mischief in them. He always had this sense of the devil in him while he was very calmly asking
questions. He read everything, and knew absolutely all aspects of the business, including literally what
the box-office receipts of every theater in the world were over the past few years.
[On Stanley Kubrick] I knew Stanley for 30 years but never met him until "Eyes Wide Shut." I had
talked to him all my life, and he didn't believe that we'd never met. I had never even seen his face. I had
no idea what he looked like. I got acquainted with him when I was working on "Jeremiah Johnson"... It
had very archaic language and I was terribly worried about how it was going to be subtitled or dubbed. I
worried that it would lose a lot of its flavor. The head of the studio was a guy named John Calvin. He
was head of Warner Brothers at the time. I told him that I was worried about this and he said, "Well, talk
to Kubrick, 'cause he knows everything about everything." I told him that I didn't even know Kubrick
and he was like, "No, no, you guys will get along great." So he set up this phone call and I didn't get off
the phone with Stanley for the next 25 years. He was big into faxing things. He kept up with the world
through faxes and phone calls. He never left England; never, not once. Wouldn't get on a boat, wouldn't
get on a plane, wouldn't do any of that. So he would call a lot just to check out what was out there. He'd
ask, "What good writers are out there? What should I be seeing? What should I be reading?" I remember
once we got into a discussion over there being too many words in English dialogue. So he started taping
NesCafe commercials. At the time in France there were these NesCafe commercials that were basically
mini-dramas. So Stanley would send me these little NesCafe commercials ... and he would edit them!
Then he would say, "Now, there were 93 words in this and I took 17 of them out." He'd do stuff like
this. He was a guy who was always interested in what you were doing. He'd talk for hours about a film
I'd be working on over the telephone, suggesting, "What about this? What about that?" He was a very
generous guy.
His films are usually fairly dark; they always examine

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experiences he had or from the natural impulses of his mind.
His movies are not realistic in any way; they're operas. Stanley never had realism as an ultimate goal.
When he was filming "Full Metal Jacket," Matthew Modene (Joker) finished a take and said, "That felt
pretty real." Stanley looked at Matthew and said, "Real is good. Interesting is better." And he worked
from that basis; one that wasn't too interested in reality, it was something more stylized. He was creating
something much larger than life. It wouldn't be reality but would relate more vividly to reality.
He did do one semi-realist film called "The Killing," but everything after that, from "Paths of Glory" on,
was very stylistic.
He was a technician, always his own cameraman, his own lighting director. By the time Stanley died he
owned all his own equipment. As a result of this he could shoot in a year and a half on what it would
cost one of us to shoot in four months. And that's how he got away with it. We spent a year and two
months shooting "Eyes Wide Shut" and spent the same amount of money that any other director would
have had to spend just on Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. After all, that's where a lot of the money goes
... He's only made a handful of films. He didn't work very often - he worked every six or seven years
and took a lot of time in between pictures. But his pictures always attained a sort of cult status at the very
least, and were always revered in Europe.
When "A Clockwork Orange" first opened up, people were scandalized and furious. The same
happened with "Full Metal Jacket," "The Shining" and certainly with "Eyes Wide Shut" ... No matter
what, though, his films have always gained in stature over time.
Stanley's had a career that's been singular in a certain way. There's no director's career that's been like his
in the sense that he was a kind of independent filmmaker before there were independent filmmakers. It
wasn't a mantle he was given, he just assumed it. He behaved that way his whole life. And his reputation
supported it. No matter what happened with the introduction of his films, they all subsequently would
end up being taught at schools.
He was a chess player, a chess hustler, really, and on top of that was a great photographer. He would
combine these two in his filmmaking in the way of examining every conceivable route. He had a chess
player's mind ... That's why it was so maddening to work with him as an actor, because it was not at all
uncommon to do a hundred takes. You would wonder, "Why in God's name is he doing this? How can
he find something different after take 60 or 65?" The actors found it tortuous, but you know it produced
something in terms of behavior that just doesn't get produced otherwise. I would be there and watch take
60, take 70, take 80, and things would change. You would cry sometimes, just weep - something would
happen! He was maddening in his thoroughness, obsessive; it would push the performance out to the
other end ... I don't know what he was looking for, but it worked for him.
Le Corbeau
Henri-Georges Clouzot
[On Alfred Hitchcock] I admire him very much and am flattered when anyone compares a film of mine
to his.

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Brian De Palma
I've never been accepted as that conventional artist. Whatever you say about David Lynch or Martin
Scorsese, they are considered major film artists and nobody can argue with that. I've never had that. I've
had people say it about me. And I've had people say that I'm a complete hack and, you know, derivative
and all those catchphrases that people use for me. So I've always been controversial. People hate me or
love me.
[On Alfred Hitchcock] He is the one who distilled the essence of film. He's like Webster. It's all there.
I've used a lot of his grammar.
Godard is incredibly brilliant, the things he says. Apparently here in France, the most interesting thing
when a new film of his is going to come out are his press conferences, because he's so brilliant.
It took me 20 years to appreciate Kubrick. I put Barry Lyndon on in my hotel room and couldn't look
away. That's great film making.
Shallow Grave
Danny Boyle
I think Ken Loach is an extraordinary filmmaker. It is so effortless what he does. The effortlessness with
which he can get some stuff is just extraordinary. You may not like his concerns as a filmmaker, that they
are political or whatever, and you may actually think that the films should be more exciting, they should
have more dramatic climaxes, but he is extraordinary. You think about The Godfather (1972) and that is
shot in Ken Loach's fashion, in a way. It's effortless. That's one of the things about Coppola. You never
had any fancy angles with Coppola. You don't get any of that Scorsese stuff. Those filmmakers are the
real craftsmen, the real masters. They don't need the camera to do anything for them, the whole thing is
set up - the camera just records it and you witness it. Whereas I tend to use the camera as part of the
experience, the actual point of view is part of the experience. They didn't want to do that. They wanted
something much more like looking at a painting. The camera is much more reliable and still. It won't
confuse you, you just witness what is within it.
It Happened One Night
Frank Capra
[On Preston Sturges] Jesus, he was a strange guy. Carried his own hill with him, I tell you.
[On John Ford] He is pure Ford — which means pure great.
Ugetsu
Kenji Mizoguchi
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[On Hiroshi Shimizu] People like me and Ozu get films made by hard work, but Shimizu is a genius...
Life During Wartime
Todd Solondz
Mike Leigh is a masterful filmmaker. I think it's indisputable. He works with actors like no one else.
Bad Timing
Nicolas Roeg
[On Stanley Kubrick] I must say I did like his attitude towards film and the fact that he was an artist and
complete unto himself. He wasn’t under corporate censorship, and he was never trying to make a film
that you’d be able to pigeonhole in any particular genre. I think that was the case with all his films.
The King of Kings
Cecil B. DeMille
Griffith's attitude about money was not without its adverse effects in his business life, as well, as
evidenced by a career that ranged from untold wealth to downright poverty. He was a brilliant artist but a
poor businessman. Like many another fine artist of the stage or screen, he did not fully understand the
truth of Sir Henry Irving's statement that the theatre 'must be carried on as a business or it will fail as an
art.' Griffith could never adapt himself successfully to the commercial necessities of picture making.
Before generosity can exist, feelings of compassion and kindness toward one's fellow man must be
evident, and all of the Griffith alumni describe him as a kind man, very understanding of one's feelings,
and skilled in dealing with the emotions of his actors and actresses.
David Wark Griffith was a great genius. We were thought to be rivals. In a sense, we were, but we were
never enemies; and in another sense, Griffith had no rivals. He was the teacher of us all. Not a picture
has been made since his time that does not bear some trace of his influence. He did not invent the close-
up or some of the other devices with which he has sometimes been credited, but he discovered and he
taught everyone else how to use them for more beautiful effect and better story telling on the screen.
Summer Hours
Olivier Assayas
The situation is that a thread has been cut off and it's been veryGodifficult
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generation that
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have had to reinvent–without the support of film theory–a relationship to cinema. They are the ones who
had to rebuild something. And whatever they rebuilt certainly benefited the following generation,
meaning mine. And one of the important things they did–consciously or unconsciously–is that they
substituted Bergman to the nouvelle vague. They found a symbolic father figure in Bergman that helped
them redefine an intimacy with actors, a way to express the existential issues of their generation,
reformulate the continuity between writing and filming, in a completely different way. If I had to define
where Bergman's legacy is, I would say everywhere in French cinema.
The avant-garde was a group of critics taking their first collective step toward becoming filmmakers.
They were not heralding the new but something pre-existing yet hitherto unacknowledged in commercial
cinema, and in the process they re-directed the attentions and priorities of film viewing through the
language of discovery and revelation. The collective action of the Cahiers du cinéma critics (and of those
who followed them at other publications) was fairly wondrous in and of itself, an endless lifting of the
veil of surface beauty to reveal what they took to be another deeper and truer beauty. There was a great
deal of excellent criticism (most of it written by Jean-Luc Godard), but it's the lovely tautologies and
proclamations that are often invoked nowadays. Cinema was Bresson, Renoir, Hawks, Hitchcock, Nick
Ray, and Rossellini; and cinema was not Autant-Lara, Delannoy, Decoin, Pontecorvo, Kubrick, or
Wyler.
I wouldn’t be here writing these lines but for Robert Bresson; when I was still a teenager, his films
showed me what cinema could be, showed me how cinema could rival the masterpieces of the other arts.
He showed me cinema was something worth devoting one’s life to.
Cronenberg is a genius. He reinvented genre filmmaking, giving it the depth of the most ambitious
fiction. ...I consider David Cronenberg to be one of the great modern artists.
Steven Soderbergh totally rocks. He is the bravest, smartest, most original filmmaker in the U.S. today.
My admiration for Jean-Pierre Melville has only been growing through the years. He is a minimalist, like
Bresson, but not so much in the sense of emptying the frame—it’s more about getting rid of a lot of the
visible to replace it with the invisible. I haven’t been filming a lot of gangsters, but I can understand his
fascination for both outlaws and cops, for their world haunted by betrayal and death.
I can’t believe how the genius of Sacha Guitry is misunderstood outside the borders of France. He is
actually one of the most important figures in the history of French cinema, on a par with the greatest. I
suspect he has this marginal status because when he started making films—the minute you could record
sound—he was already a middle-aged ultra-recognized, ultra-successful figure of the stage. His style
owes nothing to the silent era; he is the first French filmmaker, in a long line, who relies on language.
But he was of course never content to simply record his own plays; he was obsessed with using the
specificities of cinema to transcend them, and in doing so he pioneered a whole new language. Inspired
by his wives—first Jacqueline Delubac, then Geneviève Guitry, then Lana Marconi, who most often had
the lead—Guitry was the first French writer/director, and possibly the greatest.
A Christmas Tale
Arnaud Desplechin
I could describe the art of Godard: it is to use himself

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What these two men, Godard and Truffaut, have in common, and what Godard perhaps at one point of
his craft lost, I mean, he wanted to lose it and then he lost it, is the fact that being French or making films
in France could mean to be in love with Americana in a specific way. What is so French is trying to pay
a tribute to this little boy, 13 years old, who dislikes the French films and loves stupid American movies.
I remember so clearly, until I was 25 years old Truffaut was really nothing and Godard was everything to
me, because I could recognise something of myself in his political statements. It took me quite a while to
understand, I’m not sure that I understood it, but to try to dig what Truffaut was trying to achieve, what
kind of revolt he was trying to put on the screen. It was the same measure of anger and vivid violence,
but in a different way than Godard.
Marketa Lazarová
František Vláčil
The only ones I know well are my three loves: Buñuel, Bergman, and Bresson.
Sid & Nancy
Alex Cox
Spielberg isn’t a filmmaker, he’s a confectioner.
In Goodfellas they have this one scene where the camera goes down some steps and walks through a
kitchen into a restaurant and the critics were all over this as evidence of the genius of Scorsese and
Scorsese is a genius.
George Washington
David Gordon Green
[On independent film-makers] Kevin Smith is the only one I don't like particularly. I respect most of
them. He's the one I can't identify with in any way. He kind of created a Special Olympics for film. They
just kind of lowered the standard.
Children of Paradise
Marcel Carné
[On the French New Wave] They made “intimate” films with some
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of elevator
MAY music—like
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Truffaut. I’m not criticizing Truffaut, but one day we inaugurated a movie07 theater in the suburbs where
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Truffaut had dragged my name through the mud, mind you, but I was very honored to have my name
together with Truffaut’s. I’m not sure he felt the same way. He said so many nasty things about me . . .
Anyway, he had no comment, which was easy to do after ten years. He finished his speech by saying,
“I’ve made twenty-three movies, and I’d give them all up to have done Children of Paradise.” What
could I say after that? Nothing. He said it in front of three or four hundred people, but it was never
written down . . . I am not upset with him anymore. At that time, if I was in a studio or whatever, and Mr.
Godard came in, he said nothing to me, not even hello. It’s almost as if he turned his back on me. I mean,
I didn’t like many of his movies, but I found some things interesting once in a while, like in Weekend
and Pierrot le fou. Those movies were quite sassy. Well, sassy may be a bit slangy, so let’s say they were
bold.
Dazed and Confused
Richard Linklater
[Terrence Malick] is a guy who sees his movies and thinks, "I would have done that differently". I see
mine and say, "Given the circumstances, that's what I did and that's what I'd do again". I don't know
how much of a free-will guy I am.
I would have loved to have been a '40s studio director like Vincente Minnelli. You ended up with a real
diverse career. Now you don't get a call from [Darryl F. Zanuck] saying, "Come do this movie on
Monday". So you have to do it on your own.
Code Unknown
Michael Haneke
My favourite film-maker of the decade is Abbas Kiarostami. He achieves a simplicity that's so difficult to
attain.
I wait for each new film by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis and Bruno
Dumont. I enjoy all sorts of films, but those are the people that really interest me. I admire the Dardenne
brothers tremendously, but i feel closest, in my work, to Dumont. Dumont's films are basically existential
works, philosophical films, not political ones. I think of my own films that way.
In Cold Blood
Richard Brooks
[On Orson Welles] With Welles, everything began with the writing. And he was very good at it. He was
a terrific guy. After I had done a few days' work, we'd go over the scenes. He had such a remarkable
memory that if we'd get into a dispute about the way the story should or should not go, he'd say, "Well,
let's see, now, in 'Lear'...", and then he would review the whole of the second act of "King Lear", doing
all the parts! Or he could quote from the Old or NewTestament

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and background about story lines was inexhaustible. He was inventive. Fearless.
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Inside Llewyn Davis
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
Joel Coen: I always admired Stanley Kubrick for the fact that he managed to beat the system somehow. I
think he kind of had it all figured out.
Onibaba
Kaneto Shindo
Mizoguchi was totally and utterly Japanese. He was unique in that he was not in any way influenced by
the directors of the West. He preferred long takes, and managed to squeeze into that one take all the trials
and tribulations of life.
The Spirit of the Beehive
Víctor Erice
Mizoguchi was, first of all, an outstanding poet who was able to express, with a fertile imagination and a
sincere human profundity, the moral drama of his own generation. The destruction, the dreams, the
forbidden loves which flow through his films are about the crisis of consciousness in modern Japan.
The Graduate
Mike Nichols
[On working with Orson Welles on Catch-22 (1970)] We were talking about Jean Renoir one day on the
set and Orson said, very touchingly, that Renoir was a great man but that unfortunately Renoir didn't like
his pictures. And then he said, "Of course, if I were Renoir I wouldn't like my pictures either".
[On Stanley Kubrick] In the end, I think he began to have trouble, because if you can't leave home, you
lose track of reality, and I think that happened to him. Still, he made great movies and he was a
completely gifted director.
Paris Belongs to Us
Jacques Rivette
[On Vincente Minnelli] I’m going to make more enemies…actually

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Go OCT APR enemies,
MAY since the
👤 people
who like Minnelli usually like Mankiewicz, too. Minnelli is regarded as a07 great director thanks to the
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19 May slackening
2014 - 7 Apr 2016of the “politique des auteurs.” For François, Jean-Luc and me,2016
2015 the politique
2017 consisted
▾ About thisof
capture
saying that there were only a few filmmakers who merited consideration as auteurs, in the same sense as
Balzac or Molière. One play by Molière might be less good than another, but it is vital and exciting in
relation to the entire oeuvre. This is true of Renoir, Hitchcock, Lang, Ford, Dreyer, Mizoguchi, Sirk,
Ozu… But it’s not true of all filmmakers. Is it true of Minnelli, Walsh or Cukor? I don’t think so. They
shot the scripts that the studio assigned them to, with varying levels of interest. Now, in the case of
Preminger, where the direction is everything, the politique works. As for Walsh, whenever he was
intensely interested in the story or the actors, he became an auteur – and in many other cases, he didn’t.
In Minnelli’s case, he was meticulous with the sets, the spaces, the light…but how much did he work
with the actors?
[On James Cameron] Cameron isn't evil, he's not an asshole like Spielberg. He wants to be the new De
Mille. Unfortunately, he can't direct his way out of a paper bag.
Mankiewicz was a great producer, a good scenarist and a masterful writer of dialogue, but for me he was
never a director. His films are cut together any which way, the actors are always pushed towards
caricature and they resist with only varying degrees of success. Here’s a good definition of mise en scène
– it’s what’s lacking in the films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Whereas Preminger is a pure director. In his
work, everything but the direction often disappears.
Kubrick is a machine, a mutant, a Martian. He has no human feeling whatsoever. But it’s great when the
machine films other machines, as in 2001.
[On Pedro Almodóvar] He’s a much more mysterious filmmaker than people realize. He doesn’t cheat or
con the audience. He also has his Cocteau side, in the way that he plays with the phantasmagorical and
the real.
[On Jean-Pierre Melville] ...he's definitely someone I underrated. What we have in common is that we
both love the same period of American cinema – but not in the same way. I hung out with him a little in
the late ’50s; he and I drove around Paris in his car one night. And he delivered a two-hour long
monologue, which was fascinating. He really wanted to have disciples and become our “Godfather”: a
misunderstanding that never amounted to anything.
[The following "Mizoguchi Viewed From Here" originally appeared in the Cahiers du cinema 81
(March 1958) issue]
How does one talk about Mizoguchi without falling in a double trap: the jargon of the specialist or that of
the humanist? It may be that his films owe something to the tradition or the spirit of No or Kabuki; but
then who is to teach us the deep meaning of those traditions, and is it not a case of trying to explain the
unknown by the unknowable? What is beyond doubt is that Mizoguchi's art is based on the play of
personal genius within the context of a dramatic tradition. But will wanting to approach it in terms of the
national culture and to find it above all such great universal values make us any the wiser? That men are
men wherever they may be is something we might have predicted; to be surprised by it only tells us
something about ourselves.
But these films -- which tells us, in an alien tongue, stories that are completely foreign to our customs and
way of life -- do talk to us in a familiar language. What language? The only one to which a film-maker
should lay claim when all is said and done: the language of mise en scene. For modern artists did not
discover African fetishes through a conversion to idols, but because those unusual objects moved them a
sculptures. If music is a universal idiom, so too is mise en scene: it is this language, and not Japanese,
that has to be learned to understand 'Mizoguchi'.

A language held
https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go inOCT
common, but here brought
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degree of purity that our Western cinema has known only rarely.
18 captures 07
Some will object: why retrieve only Mizoguchi from those hazardous probings that are our visions of
Japanese cinema? But is Japanese cinema all that foreign tous anyway? It is in a language close to it, but
not the same, that other film-makers speak to us: exoticism accounts sufficiently for the superficial tone
that separates a Tadashi Imai (Darkness at Noon/Mahiru no ankoku) from a Cayatte, a Heinosuke Gosho
(Where Chimneys are Seen/Entotsu ni mieru basho) from a Becker, a Mikio Naruse (Mother/O-kasan)
from a Le Chanois, a Teinosuke Kinugasa (Gate of Hell/Jigokumon) from a Christian-Jaque, indeed a
Satoru Yamamura (The Crab-canning Facotry/Kanikosen) from a Raymond Bernard. We may perhaps
leave out Kaneto Shindo (Children of Hiroshima/Genbaku no ko) and Keisuke Kinoshita (She Was Like
a Wild Chrysanthemum/Nogiku no gtoki kimi nariki); the unfamiliarity of their inflexions, however,
owes more to preciosity than to the impulse of a personal voice. It is, in short, the best-indexed language
of Western cinema: the classic case being Kurosawa, passing from European classic to contemporary
'adventure' films with the peevish and humourless affectation of an Autant-Lara. Moreover, just compare
his Samurai films with the historical films of Mizoguchi, where one would search in vain for any trace of
a duel or for the smallest grunt (those 'picturesque' qualities that made for the facile success of The Seven
Samurai, of which we may now rightly ask whether it was especially aimed at the export market), and
where an acute sense of the past is achieved by means of an disconcerting and almost Rossellinian
simplicity.
Enough of comparisons: the little Kurosawa-Mizoguchi game has had its day. Let the latest champions of
Kurosawa withdraw from the match; one can only compare what is comparable and equal in ambition.
Mizoguchi alone imposes the sense of a specific language and world, answerable only to him.
Mizoguchi charms us because in the first place he makes no effort to charm us, and never makes any
concession to the viewer. Alone, it seems, of all the Japanese film-makers to stay within his own
traditions (Yang Kwei-Fei is part of the national repertoire by the same token as our Cid), he is also the
only one who can thus lay claim to true universality, which is that of the individual.
His is the world of the irremediable; but in it, destiny is not at the same moment fate: neither Fate nor the
Furies. There is no submissive acceptance, but the road to reconciliation; what do the stories of the ten
films we now know matter? Everything in them takes place in a pure time which is that of the eternal
present: there, past and future time often mingle their waters, one and the same meditation on duration
runs through them all; all end with the serene joy of one who has conquered the illusory phenomena of
perspectives. The only suspense is that irrepressible line rising towards a certain level of ecstasy, the
'correspondence' of those final notes, those harmonies held without end, which are never completed, but
expire with breath of the musician.
Everything finally comes together in that search for the central place, where appearances, and what we
call 'nature' (or shame, or death), are reconciled with man, a quest like that of German high Romanticism,
and that of a Rilke, an Eliot; one which is also that of the camera -- placed always at the exact point so
that the slightest shift inflects all the lines of space, and upturns the secret face of the world and of its
gods. An art of modulation.
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07/06/2018 Directors Talk Directors - My Criterion - The Criterion Collection

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go OCT APR MAY

The Criterion Collection

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go OCT APR MAY

There can be no doubt that any comparison between

possible to what was imagined. Resnais is one of them; so is Demy.

in the background, and a window opening - well, that's funny.Go

in the final speech of The Great Dictator, Charles Spencer Chaplin,

As a man of the theatre, Bergman is willing to direct plays

[On Kenji Mizoguchi] The Japanese director I admire the most.

[On Roberto Rossellini] He's one of the most important representatives

[The following is an excerpt of Kurosawa discussing Tarkovsky and Solaris]

while I heard such a big explosion as to make all the

As if to rival him, I joined in.

[The following is excerpts taken from Kurosawa's "obituary on Andrei Tarkovsky"]

The night scene of Metropolitan Highway with bright red

[On Jean-Luc Godard in an interview with John Simon (1971)]

[On Federico Fellini] He is enormously intuitive. He is intuitive; he is creative; he is an enormous force.

Fellini, Kurosawa and Bunuel move in the same fields as Tarkovsky.

told myself that, if I ever managed to become a director,

There are few people of genius in the cinema; look

The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb. And is Chaplin

Eisenstein was a director completely misunderstood by Soviet leaders, especially by Stalin.

about this; perhaps they had some kind of problem with

The 400 Blows

Nowadays, the work of Alfred Hitchcock is admired

[On Jean Renoir] The world's greatest film-maker.

[On Roberto Rossellini] In some of my films I’ve tried to follow

My religion is cinema. I believe in Charlie Chaplin…

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

[On Michelangelo Antonioni] This young Italian

Parajanov, in my opinion, is one of best film directors in the world.

[On D.W. Griffith] The teacher of us all.

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https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go OCT APR MAY 👤

Well, Fellini... there is always Fellini.

The Rules of the Game

The master of masters, the filmmaker of filmmakers,

The Complete Mr. Arkadin

that the movie has lived and breathed in a real world,

[On the death of Jean Renoir] The Greatest of all Directors.

[On Kenji Mizoguchi] No praise is too high for him.

[On Charlie Chaplin] a "genius" as an actor, but merely

[On Josef Von Sternberg] The King and Queen of camp.

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go OCT APR MAY 👤

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go OCT APR MAY 👤

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go OCT APR MAY 👤

[On M. Night Shymalan] I HATE that guy! Next question.

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go OCT APR MAY

The Last Emperor

Truffaut loved [Alfred] Hitchcock. You feel there's something Go

https://www.criterion.com/lists/178298-directors-talk-directors Go OCT APR MAY

Stanley Kubrick was one of the only modern masters we had.

Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema.

Landscape in the Mist; or any given scene in The Traveling Players—where

Griffith, [Victor] Sjöström, the German expressionists,

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

The Devil’s Backbone

Guillermo del Toro

Stanley Kubrick''s absolute control over the medium turns

When [John Ford] was dying, we used to discuss

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Letters from Fontainhas: Three Films by Pedro Costa