Didn’t he also say Renoir was the world’s greatest (and he was full of praise for Mizoguchi too).
I think so, but while I think that he was being truthful in regards to those guys, Welles is a guy who was very hard to pin down, and would lie in a lot of his interviews when he was at film festivals and such. I don’t think that generally Welles liked to sit around and talk about other peoples films so much. He loved to talk about performances, and he loved anecdotes, but he’s not one of those guys who feels comfortable talking about film and film technique in the ways that a Bergman or a Godard does.
Have you read the book that Bogdonavich put out of his interviews with Welles? Its really one of the best things I’ve ever read.
“The question is, is film merely entertainment, or is it more?” – Haneke
“If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.” – Jean-Luc Godard
Taken from The Sacrifice Diary
22 November1983, San Gregorio
“Think about the rhythm. Do not allow the scenes already shot to mislead. Build the film’s rhythm in advance. It is rhythm that sets the dramaturgy in film, in contradistinction to literature and drama.”Andrei Tarkovsky
The quotes here are excellent. Except the one from Haneke.
Anyway, can someone help me find a quote from a directors page here on theauteurs about “rendering reality” or maybe “editing reality” into films. I’ve searched like a madman, but can’t seem to find it.
From all of my readings over the years I’ve collected a rather long list of quotes that I agree with, don’t agree with, or find interesting in one way or another. Here is a sample:
“I’ve always believed film is most close to music of all the other arts.” – Stan Brakhage
“Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?” – Sergei Eisenstein
“The rhythm in my films is conceived in the script, at the desk, and is then given birth in front of the camera. All forms of improvisation are alien to me.” – Ingmar Bergman
“My problem in Hollywood was and will always be the same, arising out of the fact that the calling I seek to practice has nothing to do with the film industry.” – Jean Renoir
“I cannot understand the naïve question: ‘Is cinema an art?’ Cinematography is a very young art which has yet to acquire its pedigree.” – Jean Cocteau
“In any case, once you’re dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it’s the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting – you don’t need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to ‘explain’ them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial ‘cultural’ value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living.” – Stanley Kubrick
“What is extraordinary about film critics is that they apply critical methods which are a hundred years old to work which couldn’t have existed a hundred years ago.” – Federico Fellini
“Cinema was exploited for the straightforward and seductive purpose of recording theatrical performance. Film took a wrong turn; and we have to accept the fact that the unfortunate results of that move are still with us.” – Andrei Tarkovsky
“The rhythm in my films is conceived in the script, at the desk, and is then given birth in front of the camera. All forms of improvisation are alien to me.” – Ingmar Bergman
I read that in the 70s and 80s, all of his dialogue was improvised.
“We never enter a film through the front door,” Timothy allowed.
“Or the back door,” Stephen said.
“More often,” Timothy said, “we use the trapdoor.”
—Brothers Quay
Great films come from great vision not from great exprience.
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard. Peter Weir.
@ Meg Phoenix: you must be in a Peter Weir kick lately. First the DPS quote now this^. :)
anyway, a few favorites quotes:
Every edit is a lie.
Godard
Find your own specific voice in filmmaking and go for it. Either people will get it or they won’t and that’s what it’s all about.
Yahoo Serious
For me, the filmmaking has to be about the dramaturgy.
Neil Jordan
Howard Hughes was this visionary who was obsessed with speed and flying like a god… I loved his idea of what filmmaking was.
Martin Scorsese
I love independent filmmaking. I don’t agree with a lot of it, but that’s the point.
Gena Rowlands
I think if you look at Sam Raimi and Jim Cameron, those guys know things about filmmaking that almost nobody knows anymore. They are students of film from when they handmade films themselves, you know cut films with their own hands and razor blades and tape.
Dileep Rao
I’m Godless. I’ve had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking.
Darren Aronofsky
Nobody will ever notice that. Filmmaking is not about the tiny details. It’s about the big picture.
Ed Wood
The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It’s not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.
David Cronenberg
The horror genre is important because it promotes experimentation in filmmaking.
Richard King
Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it’s not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people’s eyes.
–John Ford
The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it. –John Huston
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. –Stanley Kubrick
A lot of times you get credit for stuff in your movies you didn’t intend to be there. –Spike Lee
Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out. –Martin Scorsese
People have forgotten how to tell a story. Stories don’t have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning. –Steven Spielberg
If two men on a job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, then both are useless. –Daryl F. Zanuck
‘’There are only two things in life that are too short – the penis and life itself. Everything else is too long.’’
Billy Wilder to Andrey Konchalovsky, after watching the rushes for a Konchalovsky film, Wilder told him a scene was too long and he’d better cut it, Konchalovsky asked him if it wouldn’t come out too short this way, Wilder responded with the above quote…
“One is always considered mad when one perfects something that others cannot grasp.” – Ed Wood.
Godard on copyrights:
I am against Hadopi [the French internet-copyright law, or its attendant agency], of course. There is no such thing as intellectual property. I’m against the inheritance [of works], for example. An artist’s children could benefit from the copyright of their parents’ works, say, until they reach the age of majority…. But afterward, it’s not clear to me why Ravel’s children should get any income from Bolero….
“The film where Luis Bunuel committed suicide.” – Jean Cocteau (referring to the movie El)
Winner of the 1961 Palm D’Or, Buñuel’s Viridiana was originally outlawed in Spain and horrified Vittorio de Sica. After a screening in Mexico City, the famous Italian neo-realist actually asked Buñuel’s wife if her husband was a monster that “beat her when [they] made love.”
“Being an artist means not having to avert one’s eyes.” -Kurosawa
“Actually we are all surpassed by life itself and never got to adapt to it because it goes the other way other than that man should have.”
Sam Peckinpah
I want to be old, so have no interest in sex any longer
Luis Buñuel (this was said by him in an interview, not exactly this way, but if you get the point…)
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
JL Godard
“The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.”
Stanley Kubrick
“The people who make entertainment movies are the pessimists, the optimist tries to shake people out of their apathy.”
Michael Haneke
Everyone would find it’s life more interesting if they didn’t compare it to the others
Henry Fonda
Plus, all of the offensive quotes from Vincent Gallo to Korine, Coppola family or Abel Ferrara are awesome.
“We need local productions rooted in the true realities of people, which are immediately accessible to people and which address their problems but also their dreams.” (Gaston Kaboré)
“What is most important is what you carry in your heart, in your soul” (Gaston Kaboré)
and here he is
(my own culture and country, but also wider humanity, for a better world)
in common with:
“My chief aim was the one which I have been pursuing ever since I started making films—to express the common humanity of man.” (Jean Renoir)
“What Hollywood really needs is a good bombing” (Jean Renoir)
dope fiend willy
When asked who his 3 favorite directors were, Orson Welles replied:
“I’ve always preferred the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.”