Godard has one testicle, I have three.
- Alejandro Jodorowsky
It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid.
- Werner Herzog, immediately after being shot during an interview, with a bb gun
Everybody denies I am a genius – but nobody ever called me one!
-Orson Welles
Hollywood is like being nowhere and talking to nobody about nothing.
-Michelangelo Antonioni
Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you’ve made is worth the misery of having to review it.
-Federico Fellini
A sign of growing old is when interviewers start asking you,“What would you do differently if you had your life to live over again?” I give some sort of answer because I don’t wish to be rude, but I don’t tell them the image that comes into my mind because they would think it vain and frivolous, and no one wants to be a subject for ridicule. I see myself as a tall, skinny Fellini, vigorously lifting weights. That’s what I would do differently. I would lift weights.
- Federico Fellini
A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.
- Jean-Luc Godard
Brandon, you quote Jodorowsky beautifully!
There’s no doubting that Godard has a powerful mind and very developed film sense, but jeez, he imparted his fair share of nonsense over the years…
“I don’t think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can’t kiss a movie.”
That old adage comes to mind: make sure your brain is engaged before you put your mouth into gear.
Take away all those filmmakers who have made us feel things keenly, the spirituality of life, its pain, its beauty and its ecstasy, its dullness and its exhilaration, the lightness of its simplicity and the immensity of its mysticism, through their inspired mise-en-scene and visionary direction…lose those parts of the works of Tarkovsky, Bergman, Cassavetes et al that have moved us through to our cores. Eisenstein, who championed the intellectual approach to film did so with a simultaneous respect for the power of feeling and emotion that individual images and their montage could produce. And if you could possibly separate feeling and intellect and jettison the former, who in their right mind would want to. Maybe a dried up, over-cerebral, over-ponderous and perhaps a little embittered filmmaker like JLG. Go lock yourself in the theory section of the library with him if you like. He does ramble on so, the old French master. Sometimes you want to say, “Shut up and smoke your cigar Jean-Luc.”
thus spake Kubrick
—Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, but the best thing that young filmmakers should do is to get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.
—The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.
—A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
@Nikhil, I love it when Godard speaks, those lines have a stupid arrogance of a master.
ANDY, I’ll say — likeable arrogance I like to call it. Another man who had a lot of that in him was Bob Dylan.
CARL, this made me crack up — Sometimes you want to say, “Shut up and smoke your cigar Jean-Luc.”
And again, Brandon, the Herzog quote is wonderful. He’s full of little gems. In an interview recently, asked whether he is at all perturbed by Abel Ferrara’s venomous rage over the suggested remake of Bad Lieutenant, Herzog replies: “No, because it’s like theatre thunder. It’s like being backstage in the 19th century, with the machines that make thunder. It has nothing do with his film. But let him rave and rant; it’s good music in the background.” You rock, Werner!
Back on task, now that I have gotten the Godard thing off my chest and praised WH, a quote I’ll offer (just to spite Jean-Luc again) is from Stanley Kubrick, “A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.”
“Cinema is truth at 24 frames per second.”
-Godard
“Cinema is lies at 24 frames per second.”
-Haneke
(Sorry to ditto you there Andy, was putting my comment through just as you were yours; still it serves to echo your good taste with Kubrick is all! ;-)
“All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.”
“Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.”
~ Godard
“Shooting a film is like taking a stagecoach ride in the old west. At first, you look forward to a nice trip. Later, you just hope to reach your destination.”
- Francois Truffaut
“I don’t try to guess what a million people will like. It’s hard enough to know what I like.”
- John Huston
“Am I a cult director? Yeah, I love all of that. I want to join the cult of the 100- to 200-million grossers and still make an artistic picture.”
- Samuel Fuller
“As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies. Naturally, Sex and Art always took precedence over cinema, but neither ever proved as dependable as the filtering of present light through that moving strip of celluloid which projects past images and voices onto a screen.”
— Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation
“Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.”
—Robert Bresson
“My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”
—Robert Bresson
“How did I get to Hollywood? By train.”
- John Ford
“It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor.”
- also John Ford
“You say someone’s called me the greatest poet of the Western saga. I am not a poet, and I don’t know what the western saga is. I would say that is horseshit. I’m just a hard-nosed, hardworking, run-of-the-mill director.
- you guessed it, John Ford
I know he doesn’t fit the definition of an auteur as has been generally accepted, but I’m sure nobody doubts his contribution to the canon of World cinema.
no problemo CarlCross and DCDreams thanks for the second quote by Bresson, i found it very true.
a few more,
There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.
- Fellini
You exist only in what you do.
-Fellini, again
Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.
- Roman Polanski
Cinema in India is like brushing your teeth in the morning. You can’t escape it.
-Shahrukh Khan
“Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.”
-Alfred Hitchcock
“Frankly, the first time I made a film, I myself didn’t know what kind of film I would make. I merely posessed one exceedingly small image. It was a very, very dark image, in which I would face the world, and try to express myself, and am decisively punished because that act conflicts with the rules of the world. When the film I made based on that image was treated coldly by the company, I knew that my image had not been wrong; and at the same time, I had been given a clue as to the type of film director I was. Since then, I have gradually come to understand myself more each time I make a film.”
-Nagisa Oshima
“Ten years of film making has taught me, above anything else, to not make a fetish of anything. I enjoy working with non-actors, but I also enjoy putting professionals and non-pros together and watching the non-pros acquire confidence from the professionals and the professionals benefit from the simplicity of the non-pros.”
-Satyajit Ray
“Godard decided that films could be made cheaply and quickly, and then set out to boldly work out what conventional items of expense could be dispensed with without destroying the essential purity of the art form. In effect, this was a fresh exploration of the fundamentals of film making, and it involved the questioning of all known methods and trying out new ones in their places. As Breathless and subsequent films proved, Godard was perfectly justified in applying rough and ready methods to films which dealt basically with unconventional people in an unconventional era. In other words, the Godard form grew out of the Godard content…”
-Satyajit Ray
“Mizoguchi and Ozu both suggest enormous reserves of power and feeling which never spill over into emotional displays.”
-Satyajit Ray
“From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought remains with me.”
-Mikio Naruse
“He was the most difficult director I ever worked for. He never said a word. A real nihilist.”
-Tatsuya Nakadai on working with Naruse in When A Woman Ascends The Stairs
“A film has to be enjoyable to make. If it fails, it means that the director’s feeling was not in it. I’m very self-indulgent, and I like to do extreme things – the more enthusiastic I am, the more extreme my technique becomes.”
-Nagisa Oshima
“If you have real talent, and have found a break in Hollywood, and wish to keep going, it may be best to not talk about art too much.”
-Satyajit Ray paraphrasing an earlier conversation with Billy Wilder while on the set of Some Like It Hot during Ray’s first visit to the US
When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.
- Jacques-Yves Cousteau
I hope I never get so old I get religious.
- Ingmar Bergman
I read this the other day and had a laugh.
[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.
- Ingmar Bergman
“You get paid the same for a bad film as you do for a good one.”
– MICHAEL CAINE
SAM PECKINPAH, from a Playboy interview, early ’70’s, when asked who among his contemporaries have enough clout to have the freedom to do things their way-
“Fellini, Kurosawa. Bergman has it. Mike Nichols thinks he does, but he doesn’t.”
Or somethin’ like that…
what’s your main goal?
to become immortal…and then to die
either the highlander or godard…i don’t know
“Were in a period when the movie screens are getting smaller and the TV screens are getting bigger. Someday they will be the same size and the movies will be made to fit on them.”
Antonioni
“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small!”
Norma Desmond
“As he buys his ticket, it’s as if the cinema-goer were seeking to make up for the gaps in his own experience, throwing himself into a search for ‘lost time’. In other words he seeks to fill that spiritual vacuum which has formed as a result of the specific conditions of his modern existence: constant activity, curtailment of human contact, and the materialist bent of modern education.”
Andrei Tarkovsky
“You want auteurs? OK, I’m gonna be such a fuckin’ auteur I’m gonna make Andrej Tarkovsky look like James fuckin’ Cameron.
And you know what else? I’m gonna put the blow-job right at the end so you sit through the whole fuckin’ movie.”
- Vincent Gallo
“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work… I want to achieve it through not dying.”
– Woody Allen
“I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members. "
-Groucho Marx
It’s a standard staple in Japanese cinema to cut somebody’s arm off and have red water hoses for veins, spraying blood everywhere.
Quentin Tarantino
“I’ll never work with you again!”
Akira Kurosawa
Nikhil
Here’s what they said:
I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.
- Jean-Luc Godard
Is the cinema more important than life?
- Francois Truffaut
The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.
- Alfred Hitchcock
I don’t think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can’t kiss a movie.
- Jean-Luc Godard
(I particularly like what Hunter S. Thompson said about the music industry. If you paid attention to the trailer, or watched Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened, you’ll see they replaced ‘music’ with ‘movies’ and gave the line to Bruce Willis.)
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
- Hunter S. Thompson
Add in other though-provoking, or just plain humorous quotes from auteurs you adore. Try sticking to the above formatting, makes it easy to read.