And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.Collection: Movies
Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye.
If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.
These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition.
And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world.
At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political.
But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.
For a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty.
I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley.
In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.
Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals.
My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life.
Ross Hunter was my assistant on Take Me to Town, He was a young man, an actor before that, and learned a lot on the picture. During shooting, Goldstein left, and Ross was most pleasant. He never interfered.
So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.
There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art.
Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.
This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.Collection: Art
I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart.Collection: Heart
There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can't reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflectionsCollection: Real
I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley. But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in themCollection: Home