Mae's Favorite Auteurs
Displaying all 20 auteurs
Oliver Stone
“I consider my films first and foremost to be dramas about individuals in personal struggles and I consider myself to be a dramatist before I am a political filmmaker.”
David O. Russell
“I think what makes compelling fiction or cinema is when you're basically taking the most intense moments of experience and you're creating a song or a narrative out of it.”
Pedro Almodóvar
“I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.”
Spike Lee
“I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.”
Hal Ashby
“Hitchhiked to Los Angeles when I was 17. Had about 50 or 60 jobs up to the time I was working as a Multilith operator at good old Republic Studios.”
James Ivory
“All my life, I’ve liked to travel and make movies and I’ve been able to combine the two. But I can’t look at the other cultures through their eyes, I can only look at them through mine, which are the eyes of an American of my generation.”
Woody Allen
“Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.”
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.”
Stephen Frears
“When you’re starting, what you chiefly have is energy and passion and that will go a long way to cover a certain amount of funkiness in how you tell a story. But you’re never going to make a film late in your career the way you made it at the beginning and to try to is insane.”
Spike Jonze
“Being able to shoot on videos and commercials — just being on the set, with only a certain amount of time and shots and sequences to do in that amount of time, learning how to work with the crew the physical production and the limitations — is all good training.”
Tim Burton
“I've always loved the idea of fairy tales, but somehow I never managed to completely connect with them. What interests me is taking those classic images and themes and trying to contemporize them a bit. I believe folk tales and fairy tales have some sort of psychological foundation that makes that possible.”
Quentin Tarantino
“I don't believe in elitism. I don't think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.”
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.”
