In the Words of the Director
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“I think they built Hollywood on the West Coast because they were always dreaming of a New World. When they arrived here, the only way to keep dreaming was to make movies. Film was the fourth dimension.” – Denis Villeneuve In the introduction to his work Nomos of the Earth Carl Schmitt wrote that the…
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“Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.“ ̶ Werner Herzog Herzog’s understanding of the origins of cinema in the country fair and circus, not the academia, cannot be stressed enough. When he was making his Aguirre, the Wrath…
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“What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous. When we use normal language we can defend ourselves because our society is a linguistic society, a semantic society. But when you…
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Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction etc…) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer Robert Bresson, a French director who gave us many masterpieces, Au Hasard Balthazar,…
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Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream. Federico Fellini…
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“I like the multiplicity of books, because each book is different in the mind of each reader. It’s the same with this film – if 300 people are in a cinema watching it, they will all see a different film, so in a way there are thousands of different versions of “Caché (Hidden)”. The point…
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“At the beginning of my career, I had a lot of social anger. I just wanted to tell you how fucked up the society is. This was the beginning. Afterwards, I began to understand that the problems were not only social; they are deeper. I thought they were only ontological and when I understood more…
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When we talk about personal expression I’m often reminded of [Elia] Kazan’s film America America – the story of his uncle’s journey from Anitolia to America; the story of so many immigrants who came to this country from a very, very foreign land. I kind of identified with it and was very moved by it. Actually,…
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Verhoeven compared making RoboCop with making Elle and once said that the experience was a “leap into the unknown”. He elaborates it in an interview: So you go to an unknown part of the world where you don’t know the people, and that’s frightening. But also, at the same time, if you do it, it turns…
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I tried to show the collapse of the Japanese family system through showing children growing up. Yasujirô Ozu The younger generation plays baseball, it is influenced by American culture in general, it is imbued with the values of freedom of choice and the pursuit of individual happiness. The older generation, on the other hand, values…
