“I was raised on plots and I decided that too much plot in a given picture was a waste of footage. The result was that I stressed characterization. This is the reason that the players who portrayed parts in the pictures which I made became famous. The plot was forgotten, but the character remained in […]
“A director must be pretty bad if he can’t get a thrill out of war, murder, robbery.” — James Whale “He influenced every director that came after him in the genre, and his films aren’t relics…That’s quite an achievement.” — biographer James Curtis With director Boris Karloff. The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). With […]
“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” — Walt Disney Merbabies (1938) “Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.” – Walt Disney Here he is in 1954, the year Walt Disney Studios got involved in a […]
“I trained myself to be able to imagine an entire musical sequence without having sets put up on the stage, to film it exactly as it would be seen on the screen without the help of editing or of multiple cameras. Everything is prepared in my head beforehand. I tell the cameraman what I want, […]
“There are a thousand ways to point a camera, but really only one.” — Ernst Lubitsch “The greatest aid to the development of emotionalism and surest guide to the core of dramatic action lies in the closeup. Not only does it give the brain process, but it may (to the […]
“I come from a school where you work by implication rather than by direct display. Whether it’s violence or sex, I still believe you can show both of those quite well without going into explicit detail.” — Fred Zinneman Source: 1982 “In Austria, discrimination had been part of life since time immemorial. It was […]
“There are so many things necessary for the making of good pictures, and so few people can qualify! They grasp the superficial points, fill in with a lot of ‘hokum’ and ‘get by,’ temporarily! But there is no sincerity, and it tells in the end. Whatever I do may be wrong, but while I am […]
“I felt the urge to direct, because I couldn’t stomach what was being done with what I wrote.” — Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993) “I couldn’t do films today. In fact I sensed that – I must have sensed that even more than I thought I did, like a hurricane way off on the horizon. You […]
“There are some things which cannot be learned, though they can be studied. Among them are the laws of art—and the lawlessness of it, as well.” — Josef von Sternberg, posing next to a bronze bust of himself, created by Rudolf Belling in 1930. The Casa von Sternberg, built in 1935 by Richard Neutra. […]
“Yep, this business is the biggest gamble. It’s very true here that prosperity is just around the corner. And there are a lot of corners in making pictures.” — W.S. Van Dyke Source: 1937 “There’s a movie boner in ‘Naughty Marietta’ which no one noticed. I’m surprised no one saw it. Miss MacDonald is […]