The Mission

Otar Ioseliani:

'What’s important for the structure of the film is that the spectators don’t know the people in the film except as what they play in the film.'

'We are here as a bridge to pass on the things that we have absorbed, with our point of view added to it. This includes Mark Twain, Flaubert, Anatole France, all that has been thought and communicated; we absorbed it and we digested it.'

'The whole set of standards, likes, and dislikes which you attach to this or that context, that whole conglomeration — this was all shaped a long time ago and is a part of your ego. In that sense, it makes no difference whether you're filming in Africa or in Italy. Your view is always with you.'

'My films are parables, after all, and the language of a parable is — geared toward a certain kind of universality. Like my African film — that could have been shot in Georgia.'

'I try not let the actors read the screenplay. Having read the screenplay, they usually see an angle to their role that I have no need for.'

'Oh yeah, that's terrible! That's the Stanislavsky Method — to become embedded in the characters life... That's dreadful! If you are making a movie, you should know what it is that you want it to be about. I agree with Tarkovsky, the more the actor knows, the more he interferes with the director, because he already acts out that resulting idea, that knowledge of his character.'

'Of course, it comes down to linguistics — if we are not speaking the same language, then how is it possible for us to understand each other. If by language one means a set of experiences. Indeed, we orient ourselves towards people who have a set of standards and criteria similar to ours, and it's exactly these people that appreciate our work. Placed outside that circle, the work loses the meaning that the author inserted in it.'

'One cannot invent anything, I'm firmly certain of that. One can just get lost in thoughts about something, and the solution will suddenly come to you; or one can experience something very intensely, and the universality and discrepancy of the feeling will yield some sort of formula.'

'There is no return to anywhere period. People die, and a generation vanishes, together with the whole frame of reference that we use for support, and the sense of ease disappears. As if everyone keeps drawing toward some barrier where all fall down and what comes in turn are new waters. Heraclitus was right, of course: you can never step into the same river twice.'

'.. those who film truly great works of literature — that's simply absurd. It's a pretty bad idea, for example, to mess with Mikhail Bulgakov. Everything that he wanted to say to the world he communicated with the means that were natural to him. And he's not subject to explications. That's what I think. If it's some lousy little book, then I guess you could do it. But then why use the book? You can invent it yourself. Big deal, as if it were Newton's Law.'

'In any case, all the moans and tears about how everything was good before and how worse times are coming stem from the fact that what came earlier was familiar to us, and that this familiarity has gone, never to return. That's how it is in this world. What's coming will be a different time, just as shitty as ours, but special and intelligible to someone else other than ourselves.'

Luis Bunuel:

'Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.'

'A paranoiac like a poet, is born, not made.'

'In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.'

'You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.'

'A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive.'

'The Cinema seems to have been invented to express the life of the subconscious, the roots of which penetrate poetry so deeply.'

'I would give my life for a man who is looking for the truth. But I would gladly kill a man who thinks that he has found the truth.'

'Age is something that doesn't matter unless you're a cheese.'

'I say to hell with the work you have to do to earn a living! That kind of work does us no honor; all it does is fill up the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. But the work you do because you like to do it, because you've heard the call, you've got a vocation - that's ennobling! We should all be able to work like that. Look at me, Saturno - I don't work. And I don't care if they hang me, I won't work! Yet I'm alive! I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it!'

'If someone were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I'd like to spend them, I'd reply 'Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams.'

Andrzej Wajda:

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.'

'As I said earlier, there are no writers who could create a literary vision of the new reality.'

'We expected that people were just waiting for the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least for its retreat, and they were going to be full of initiative in all areas of life - in culture, in economy and in politics.'

'However, that old mode of Polish filmmaking virtually disappeared.'

'Why does there exist a global American entertainment industry, but there isn't an equivalent coming from France or Italy? This is the case simply because the English language opens the whole world to the American cinema.'

Sergei Parajanov:

'I believe you have to be born a director. It's like a child's adventure:
you take the initiative among other children and become a director creating a mystery.
You mould things into shape and create. You torment
people with your ``artistismus`` - scaring mother and grandmother in the
middle of the night. You dress yourself up like Charlie's Aunt, or as (Hans
Christian) Andersen's heroes. Using feathers from a trunk, you transform
yourself into a rooster or a firebird. This has always preoccupied me, and
that is what directing is.'

'A director can't be trained, not even in a film school like VGIK (Soviet All-
Union State School for Film Art and Cinematography). You can't learn it.
You have to be born with it. You have to possess it in your mother's
womb. Your mother must be an actress, so you can inherit it. Both my
mother and father were artistically gifted.'

''Directing is fundamentally the truth as it's transformed into images: sorrow, hope, love, beauty. Sometimes I tell others the stories in my screenplays, and I ask: ``Did I make it up, or is it the truth?`` Everyone says: ``It's made up.`` No, it's simply the truth as I perceive it.'

''I'm a graphic artist and a director who seeks to shape images. Savchenko, our mentor, encouraged us to sketch our thoughts -- and give them plastic form. We all had to draw our thoughts at the film school. For the entrance examination we were brought to a room and told: ``Draw whatever you like...'

''My films have only one thing in common: a similarity in style. My life is testimony enough. I didn't want to found a school or teach anyone anything. Whoever tries to imitate me is lost.'

'Pasolini is not just a god. He is closer to God. He's also closer to the pathology of our existence on earth, to our generation.'

Alexander Sokurov:

'There is a huge distance between literature and cinema. I would say that they have nothing in common. The script or a history told in words are absolutely different kinds of storytelling, and in this way the visual nature of the story and the script are completely different.'

'Art is a helpless child -- we need him and we created him and he never grows up, art has its father and its mother and creators but it's sort of a helpless child that needs to be protected all the time.'

'There are no timeless films at all, or timeless filmmakers. We all make mistakes. We know about the existence of very gifted composers or writers, but no filmmakers. We are condemned to make mistakes. Because we are filmmakers, we are dealing with temporary instruments, and this is the reason for our mistakes. These instruments are not proven by time. They are too young.'

'Only some filmmakers are able to say: “Wait. We are not able to understand this life, we don’t have the necessary distance. We don’t know the direction of this progress, so how can we say something if we can’t understand it?'

'So in my opinion, this love for crime plots, for representing crime on the screen, is slowly pushing literary plots out of our consciousness, our mind. In this way, people are not more interested in the mind, for work of the mind. They are not going to engage the mind, and we can observe the results of this everywhere. The politicians who are completely ungifted, aggressive; they have power now. You can also see it in the aggressive behavior of people today.'

Krzysztof Kieslowski:

'In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.'

'There are mysteries, secret zones in each individual.'

'I like chance meetings - life is full of them. Every day, without realising it, I pass people whom I should know.'

'I really don't know anything about music, and it's no great experience for me. But I do think that music has a purifying element.'

'Things have changed for the worse. That's why former eastern bloc countries are electing communists again. We are missing them and longing for the times we cursed before.'

'Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them - which sometimes happened.'

Alejandro Jodorowsky:

'I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.'

'I don't live in France; I live in myself.'

'I didn't want to make cinema so a person forgets himself and has a lot of fun. 'I forget myself, I am a little poor consumer.' I wanted to make a picture where someone who sees it say, 'This is me! This is me!'