Jon's Favorite Auteurs
Displaying auteurs 1 - 20 of 52 in total
Peter Greenaway
“I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realizing all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.”
Andrzej Żuławski
“To please the majority is the requirement of the Planet Cinema. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t make a concession to viewers, these victims of life, who think that a film is made only for their enjoyment, and who know nothing about their own existence.”
Mike Leigh
“The whole thing about making films in an organic film location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across”
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.”
Joseph Losey
“Films can illustrate our existence…they can distress, disturb and provoke people into thinking about themselves and certain problems. But NOT give the answers.”
Jack Clayton
“I don't believe in being fashionable. Try to be and you're usually out of date before you start.”
Fritz Lang
“I should say that I was a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or rarely, with my ears...to my constant regret.”
David Lean
“My distinguishing talent is the ability to put people under the microscope, perhaps to go one or two layers farther down than some other directors.”
Shôhei Imamura
“I show true things using fictional techniques but maintaining truthfulness — that's where my approach differs from Ozu. He wanted to make film more aesthetic. I want to make it more real. He aspired toward a cinematic nirvana. When I was his assistant, I was very opposed to him, but now, whilst still not liking his films, I'm much more tolerant. As for me, I'd like to destroy this premise that cinema is fiction.”
Dziga Vertov
“I am eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.”
Terrence Malick
“[On Badlands (1973)] I tried to keep the 1950s to a bare minimum. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything. I wanted the picture to set up like a fairy tale, outside time, like Treasure Island. I hoped this would, among other things, take a little of the sharpness out of the violence, but still keep its dreamy quality.”
Luis Buñuel
“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.'”
Tommy Wiseau
“As a director, I have to feel realism from actors, and they can’t be plastic. The words for me are secondary, but the chemistry between the actors is most important.”
Michael Powell
“I’m not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through the cinema...”
Tony Richardson
“It’s no exaggeration to say that the ‘sequence’ group changed the whole way of feeling and thinking about film in England – at any rate for a few inspiring years, before the British sank once again into complacency and philistinism.”
