49 Filmmaking Quotes

Locations are all tough, all miserable. I never left the sound stage for 18 years at Warners. We never went outside the studio, not even for big scenes.

Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?

The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me. Material was the last thing in the world I thought about. You only had to turn me loose on the set and I'd have material in two minutes, because I'd been doing it all my life.

I don't watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry... and miserable. I think it's awful.

I like racing but food and pictures are more thrilling. I can't give them up. In racing you can be certain, to the last thousandth of a second, that someone is the best, but with a film or a recipe, there is no way of knowing how all the ingredients will work out in the end. The best can turn out to be awful and the worst can be fantastic. Cooking is like performing and performing like cooking.

Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. Armageddon is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any 30 seconds at random, and you'd have a TV ad. The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out.

The most expensive habit in the world is celluloid, not heroin, and I need a fix every few years.

James Caan told me at the end of filming 'Elf' that he had been waiting through the whole film for me to be funny - and I never was.

I always thought that I would work behind the camera, because... it's a more comfortable place for me to be, really.

I don't act, anyway. The stuff is all injected as we go along. My pictures are made without script or written directions of any kind.

Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'

A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar- you pretend it's not there.

With a good script, a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script, a mediocre director can produce a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can't possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. The script must be something that has the power to do this.

It's about two percent movie-making and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life.

What Keaton did physically, is actually quite startling when you discover that he did all of his own stunts... The famous one is when the house falls. He had to stand on a mark. I'm told it was a nail - if he moved an inch to one side he would have been crushed to death.

It was on tiny wheels with a mount for the camera that put the lens about two feet above the ground. On it rode the camera operator and the assistant who changed the focus and that's all. Fred always wanted to keep the camera in as tight as possible, and they used to shoot with a 40 millimetre lens, which doesn't give you too much leeway. So every time Fred and Ginger moved toward us, the camera had to go back, and every time they went back, the camera went in. The head grip who was in charge of pushing this thing was a joy to watch. He would maintain a consistent distance, and when they were in the midst of a hectic dance that's quite a stunt.

In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make something. I always admire this. But I can't see his pictures. I sit for perhaps twenty-five or thirty or fifty minutes and then I have to leave, because his pictures make me so nervous. I have the feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don't understand what it is, and sometimes I have the feeling that he's bluffing, double-crossing me.

The final scene when Death dances off with the travelers was:shot at Hovs hallar. We had packed up for the day because of an approaching storm. Suddenly, I caught sight of a strange cloud. Gunnar Fischer hastily set the camera back into place. Several of the actors had already returned to where we were staying, so a few grips and a couple of tourists danced in their place, having no idea what it was all about. The image that later became famous of the Dance of Death beneath the dark cloud was improvised in only a few minutes. That's how things can happen on the set.

I believe Bergman, De Sica, and Fellini are the only three filmmakers in the world who are not just artistic opportunists. By this I mean they don't just sit and wait for a good story to come along and then make it. They have a point of view which is expressed over and over and over again in their films, and they themselves write or have original material written for them.

I have always admired him, and I wish I could be a equally good filmaker as he is, but it will never happen. His love for the cinema almost gives me a guilty conscience.

It's very important for me to be in movies that don't have a message. Messages tend to be a little preachy, and I don't think that's what movies are about. It's important for me to be in movies that have a human level, have a heart in them. That's the reason why I did this (Rendition) and it just so happens to be really topical. This political issue is a very important one right now which as Americans we need to look at. So it seems like it's (the film) is very political, it seems like there's a message in it, but ultimately there's a real story about human beings dealing with actual human things.

In a statement Dobson announced he supported 'Mel Gibson and his film, The Passion of the Christ, saying Gibson's anti-Semitic remarks had nothing to do with 'one of the finest films of this era.' He explained further that 'we certainly do not condone that racially insensitive outburst,' but added, 'Mel has apologized profusely for the incident and there the matter should rest.' On the movie, 'Our endorsement of it stands as originally stated. We did not believe it was anti-Semitic in 2004, and our views have not changed,' Dobson said.

'Well, I had to do a nude scene [in the play Indiscretions], and you're on stage naked but you get over it, you do whatever you have to do. But the first night, my character is just getting out of the bath, and the rest of the crew had poured in freezing cold water.'

It was horrible, I hated it. Brad and Tom were like my big brothers on the set, so it was like kissing your big brother - totally gross.

Why should I indulge myself and do a David Lean-ish kind of film? I could do my little Jewish Brief Encounter and disguise it - shorten the noses. But it wouldn't be as much fun as delivering my dish of insanity'.

But you can't emphasize 'beef', that's like his wanting me to emphasize 'in' before 'July'! Come on, fellows, you're losing your heads! I wouldn't direct any living actor like this in Shakespeare! The way you do this, it's impossible!

De Mille's bang-them-on-the-head-with-wild-orgies-and-imperilled-virginity style is at its ripest; the film is just about irresistible.

Some of the acting is better than the film deserves. Make that all of the acting. Actually, the film stock itself is better than the film deserves. You know when sometimes a film catches fire inside a projector? If it happened with this one, I suspect the audience might cheer.

Walt Disney had a saying that he doesn't make movies for children, but he makes movies for the child in all of us. As a film maker I guess that's all you can really do, is make a movie for your own sensibilities.

The major difference between Astaire and Kelly is a difference, not of talent or technique, but of levels of sophistication. On the face of it, Kelly looks the more sophisticated. Where Kelly has ideas, Astaire has dance steps. Where Kelly has smartly tailored, dramatically apt Comden and Green scripts, Astaire in the Thirties made do with formulas derived from nineteenth-century French Farce. But the Kelly film is no longer a dance film. It's a story film with dances, as distinguished from a dance film with a story. When Fred and Ginger go into their dance, you see it as a distinct formal entity, even if it's been elaborately built up to in the script. In a Kelly film, the plot action and the musical set pieces preserve a smooth community of high spirits, so that the pressure in a dance number will often seem too low, the dance itself plebeian or folksy in order to 'match up' with the rest of the picture.

Winter Light - suppose we discuss that now?... The film is closely connected with a particular piece of music: Stravinski's A Psalm Symphony. I heard it on the radio one morning during Easter, and it struck me I'd like to make a film about a solitary church on the plains of Uppland. Someone goes into the church, locks himself in, goes up to the altar, and says: 'God, I'm staying here until in one way or another You've proved to me You exist. This is going to be the end either of You or of me!' Originally the film was to have been about the days and nights lived through by this solitary person in the locked church, getting hungrier and hungrier, thirstier and thirstier, more and more expectant, more and more filled with his own experiences, his visions, his dreams, mixing up dream and reality, while he's involved in this strange, shadowy wrestling match with God. We were staying out on Toro, in the Stockholm archipelago. It was the first summer I'd had the sea all around me. I wandered about on the shore and went indoors and wrote, and went out again. The drama turned into something else; into something altogether tangible, something perfectly real, elementary and self-evident. The film is based on something I'd actually experienced. Something a clergyman up in Dalarna told me: the story of the suicide, the fisherman Persson. One day the clergyman had tried to talk to him; the next, Persson had hanged himself. For the clergyman it was a personal catastrophe.

'Yeah, I got blown up, cut up...I remember actually, when I had to go the Ripley premiere which was happening at that time, I arrived with this huge gash in my head. Very cool, really'. - about working on Enemy at the Gates

A murder without gleaming scissors is like asparagus without the hollandaise sauce - tasteless.

Filmmmaking encompasses everything, from tricking people into investing in it, to putting on the show, to trying to distill down to moments in time, and ape reality but send this other message. It's got everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw, and I loved my electric football sets, and I painted little things and made sculptures and did matte painting and comic books and illustrated stuff, and took pictures, had a darkroom, loved to tape-record stuff. It's all of that. It's not having to grow up. It's four-dimensional chess, it's strategy, and it's being painfully honest, and unbelivably deceitful, and everything in between.

Violence shouldn't be presented as drama. I think people looking for an easy way out often write scenes where characters come into violent conflict as opposed to looking for the true drama in the situation. That's a shortcoming of a lot of films and television shows. I think certain presentations of violence are not immoral, but amoral.

Maybe I'm a dummy, but I don't worry that a lot of my films haven't had big results at the box office, because I'm not a businessman. Believe me, I would love for one of my movies to be accepted by a wide audience, but I'm not going to do a film just because it's going to do that. (1999)

It's incredibly flattering, and really ironic. I grew up quoting Fletch and Raising Arizona, and now people quote the flicks I've done back to me. Weird, but nice.

In the Canadian film Hardcore Logo, a Canadian punk rocker suggests 'Faster, Leonard Cohen! Die! Die!' as a possible band name. This also refers to the film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!.