Kenji's Favorite Auteurs
Displaying auteurs 1 - 20 of 28 in total
David Lynch
“I don't think about technique. The ideas dictate everything. You have to be true to that or you're dead.”
Bruce Conner
“With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.”
Yasujirô Ozu
“I formulated my own directing style in my own head, proceeding without any unnecessary imitation of others… For me there was no such thing as a teacher. I have relied entirely on my own strength.”
Anthony Mann
"Primarily known for his Westerns, Mann portrayed a world of violence against some of the most striking natural vistas in cinema history. His crime films are gritty and real, and all his work reflects an exploration of the complex psychology of the human soul." —William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)
Kenji Mizoguchi
“You must put the odor of the human body into images...describe for me the implacable, the egoistic, the sensual, the cruel...there are nothing but disgusting people in this world.”
Nicholas Ray
“You like these films, but you can't imagine how often they represent only fifty percent of what I wanted to do. You have no idea how I had to fight to achieve even that fifty percent.”
Joel Coen
“The characters are the result of two things-first, we elaborate them into fairly well-defined people through their dialogue, then they happen all over again, when the actor interprets them. ”
Tsai Ming-liang
“The body always plays an important role in my films. You could say the body is the most beautiful thing we have or you could say it’s the ugliest thing we have. We can sell bodies, we can adore or worship bodies.”
Werner Herzog
“It is my duty to direct because the films might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”
Jia Zhangke
“I believe that it doesn't really matter how large an audience my film gets; as long as my films can be shown in China, and there can be any kind of real market for them here, that would be hugely significant for me personally.”
Olivier Assayas
“With Irma Vep, all of a sudden I decided that it was okay to mix genre, to mix cultures, and that movies sometimes could be experiments, that within the format of modern cinema, within the format of narrative, you could experiment by mixing elements.”
Jim Jarmusch
“I always start with characters rather than with a plot, which many critics would say is very obvious from the lack of plot in my films - although I think they do have plots - but the plot is not of primary importance to me, the characters are. ”
David Cronenberg
“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing their whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”
