Raul Ruiz, director of Mysteries of Lisbon and Night Across the Street, from the second volume in his Poetics of Cinema: “What we have seen is something new, something the art of memory could not have foreseen: images striving for their independence. They aim to make themselves noticeable, to have greater worth than that of […]
Steven Spielberg in an interview about making Lincoln: “I require fear in order to run towards something. Fear never makes me run away from anything but the more scared I am, the more frightened I am I have to run into what’s scaring me to try to figure out what it is because it has […]
Wim Wenders at Naked Punch: There are films made to exist as box office results first, or as reviews first, or as expression of the author first. My films are meant to come to life in people’s heads. They are incomplete before, actually they are meant to be incomplete. I see them like open systems […]
Simon West (Laura Croft: Tomb Raider), quoted at flicksandbits.com: I wanted to direct [The Expendables 2] because I know how much people love these characters, and now they’re going to get to see more of them in even higher adrenaline situations, plus I loved the first film, The Expendables. I think audiences connect with this […]
Speaking, in an interview about Once Upon a Time in Anatolia*, about the influence of the works of Chekov, and other literature, on his films: I believe that literature has had more impressions on my filmmaking than cinema. But I don’t feel like making adaptations. They have very different natures. But I always draw benefits […]
On directing actors: “I want to see them do the work. All I’m trying to do is make it easy on the actor, because once you start to shoot, the actor is the artist. I don’t say, ‘Here’s the way I want it done,’ because I want to see something I’ve never seen before. How […]
“The story can only be told in a particular form. It can’t be told in a painting. The point is: it’s very important that what you do is specific to the medium in which you’re doing it, and that you utilise what is specific about that medium to do the work. And if you can’t […]
Cineaste: Why are there so many silences and so little dialog in your films? Jean-Pierre Dardenne: In fact, The Son is a film about the difficulty of speaking…. We are more interested in trying to give meaning to a scene by the way we film the relations between the characters’ bodies and what gestures a […]
From Notes on the Cinematographer: Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. Make them desire it. Be as ignorant of what you are going to catch as is a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod. (The fish that arises […]