World Renown Directors Speak
- Written by Robert Adziashvili
‘Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.’
‘If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.’
‘I’ve always been fascinated by Eisenstein.’
‘I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question ‘why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?’
‘We do not need a text-based cinema… we need an image-based cinema.’
‘Cinema ceases to be passive and becomes active: you, the audience, are now, in some senses, in charge of the filmmaking process. You have all got mobile phones, you have all got cam recorders, and you’ve all got laptops, so you’re all filmmakers.’
‘I want to be a prime creator – as every self-regarding artist should do.’
‘We have more than enough deodorized, over-the-top, sentimental cinema. Let’s try to bring a little human intelligence into things. It can be very rewarding.’
‘Most people are visually illiterate. Most people don’t understand images: they don’t understand how to interpret them or how to manufacture them.’
‘It’s very difficult to understand, but I’m looking for a non-narrative, multi-screen, present-tense cinema. Narrative is an artifact created by us. It does not exist at all in nature; it is a construct made by us, and I wonder whether we need the narrative anymore.’
Satyajit Ray:
‘When I’m shooting on location, you get ideas on the spot – new angles. You make not major changes but important modifications, that you can’t do on a set. I do that because you have to be economical.’
‘The director is the only person who knows what the film is about.’
‘I had developed this habit of writing scenarios as a hobby. I would find out which stories had been sold to be made into films and I would write my own treatment and then compare it.’
‘I don’t start a film with the heroine but with the cinema subject. If there is a woman in the story, she has to be of a particular type. It’s not as if I start with an actress and then think what kind of film.’
‘The only solutions that are ever worth anything are the solutions that people find themselves.’
Akira Kurosawa:
Man is a genius when he dreams. Dream what you are capable of. The harder you dream it, the sooner it will come true.
‘Of all my films, people wrote to me most about this one… …I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I’ve liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film. He is still my favourite author, and he is the one – I still think – who writes most honestly about human existence.’
‘I have no idea who the characters are, later, their personalities take over anything I might want to do. I end up writing not from my own will, but from theirs-they come alive as I write and make me do things that I couldn’t have planned.’
‘In a mad world, only the mad are sane.’
‘The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing.
David Lynch:
‘Digital video is so beautiful. It’s lightweight, modern, and it’s only getting better. It’s put film into the La Brea Tar Pits.’
‘The ideas dictate everything, you have to be true to that or you’re dead.’
‘Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too.’
‘See, a painting is much cheaper than making a film. And photography is, you know, way cheap. So if I get an idea for a film, there are many ways to get it together and go realize that film. There’s really nothing to be afraid of.’
‘If you stay true to your ideas, film-making becomes an inside-out, honest kind of process.’
‘I don’t remember my dreams too much. I hardly have ever gotten ideas from nighttime dreams. But I love daydreaming and dream logic and the way dreams go.’
Alfred Hitchcock :
‘There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it’
‘I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.’
‘Television has brought back murder into the home – where it belongs.’
‘Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.’
‘In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.’
‘If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.’
Sam Peckinpah:
‘There is a great streak of violence in every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it will break out in war or in madness.’
‘I regard everything with irony, including the face I see in the mirror when I wake up in the morning.’
Ridley Scott :
‘The ego is there, but I’m learning to channel it.’
‘Technology continues to bring us wondrous advances in filmmaking to improve how we view movies.’
‘The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.’
Christopher Nolan
‘I have been interested in dreams, really since I was a kid. I have always been fascinated by the idea that your mind, when you are asleep, can create a world in a dream and you are perceiving it as though it really existed.’
‘If I could steal someone’s dream myself, I’d have to go for one of Orson Welles.’
‘I try not to have actors in mind when I write because the tendency then is to be influenced by either their last performance or your favorite of their performances.’
‘I just love photographing things and putting them together to tell a story.’