Directors Talk Directors and more. Catching a glimpse into the minds behind the films we love.
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Federico Fellini on making 8½ (1963):
"It’s difficult enough to remember the films I have made, the motifs even. Anyway, for some time I had had in mind the idea of making the portrait of a man in its many layers: his memories, fantasies, dreams, his everyday life, a character who as yet had no professional or personal identity (at the beginning he wasn’t a film director). I wanted to recount the multi-dimensionality of a day, a conscious and an unconscious life unfolding like a spiral, without defining boundaries, abandoning any idea of plot in favour of a free narration, a chat. The idea was to restore the sense of a time where past, present, and future, dreams, memories, and desires were blended together. It was a very ambitious project, so much so that I couldn’t express it. Then I went to Chianciano, a spa town, to take a cure, and this environment—its ritual queuing with a glass waiting for health to be restored, the grandiosity of the spa, the purgatorial sense which is always present when a collective of people are united in the same ritual, like a ballet—this brought to me the background for these meditations: a man caught in a moment of suspension in his daily rhythms, there because there is a threat, perhaps an illness. But I didn’t know my character. I had thought of a writer, a lawyer, a journalist: I couldn’t make up my mind, and these memories, these meditations without a face were fading into nothing. Perhaps this was the great lesson of 8½: at some point I told myself, “Get the engine started, get everybody on board, somebody will provide, force other people to make you do something.” So I did. I started the construction of the set, put the actors under contract, and the film took off. In the beginning, I didn’t have a script, only some notes, a scene or two written with Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano, and my inexhaustible, endless chattering about what I wanted to do. We started to build the scenery of the farmhouse, and after two months of intense work I realised that I didn’t know what I wanted. I would go every day to the studios and spend all day in my office, drawing, making calls, but the film was no longer there." 1/2
Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver (1976):
"Brian De Palma introduced me to Paul Schrader. We made a pilgrimage out to see Manny Farber, the critic, in San Diego. I wanted Paul to do a script of The Gambler by Dostoevsky for me. But Brian took Paul out for dinner, and they contrived it so that I couldn't find them. By the time I tracked them down, three hours later, they'd cooked up the idea of Obsession. But Brian told me that Paul had this script, Taxi Driver, that he didn't want to do or couldn't do at that time, and wondered if I'd be interested in reading it. So I read it and my friend read it and she said it was fantastic: we agreed that this was the kind of picture we should be making.
That year, 1974, De Niro was about to win the Academy Award for The Godfather Part II, Ellen Burstyn won the Award for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and Paul had sold The Yakuza to Warner Brothers, so it was all coming together. Michael and Julia Phillips, who owned the script, had won an Award for The Sting and figured there was enough power to get the film made, though in the end we barely raised the very low budget of $1.3 million. In fact, for a while we even thought of doing it on black and white videotape! Certainly we felt it would be a labour of love rather than any kind of commercial success — shoot very quickly in New York, finish it in Los Angeles, release it and then bounce back into New York, New York, on which we'd already begun pre-production. De Niro's schedule had to be rearranged anyway, because he was due to film 1900 with Bertolucci.
Much of Taxi Driver arose from my feeling that movies are really a kind of dream-state, or like taking dope. And the shock of walking out of the theatre into broad daylight can be terrifying. I watch movies all the time and I am also very bad at waking up. The film was like that for me — that sense of being almost awake. There's a shot in Taxi Driver where Travis Bickle is talking on the phone to Betsy and the camera tracks away from him down the long hallway and there's nobody there. That was the first shot I thought of in the film, and it was the last I filmed. I like it because I sensed that it added to the loneliness of the whole thing, but I guess you can see the hand behind the camera there.
The whole film is very much based on the impressions I have as a result of growing up in New York and living in the city. There's a shot where the camera is mounted on the hood of the taxi and it drives past the sign ‘Fascination’, which was on Broadway. It's that idea of being fascinated, of this avenging angel floating through the streets of the city, that represents all cities for me. Because of the low budget, the whole film was drawn out on storyboards, even down to medium close-ups of people talking, so that everything would connect. I had to create this dream-like quality in those drawings. Sometimes the character himself is on a dolly, so that we look over his shoulder as he moves towards another character, and for a split second the audience would wonder what was happening. The overall idea was to make it like a cross between a Gothic horror and the New York Daily News."
— Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie (Faber and Faber, 1989)
Jean Renoir on making Swamp Water (1941):
"Here's what happened: The film took place in Georgia, and so I asked the studio, “When are we leaving for Georgia?” They were quite surprised. They said, “Do you think we built a studio worth so many millions, in which we can reproduce anything, so that we would have to go to Georgia? We're going to build Georgia right here.” I didn't buy this, and protested mightily. The problem was presented to Zanuck, who squirmed. He said to himself, “Boy, these French people have some crazy ideas.” I told him, “I may have some crazy ideas, but I'd rather do nothing than do this film in the studio. It seems to me that in Georgia we'll at least find some exteriors. I'm not saying we shouldn't do the interiors here, or even some atypical exteriors — Why not construct the front of a house in the studio? — but everything that expresses the character of the Georgia countryside, I want to do in Georgia.” So we went to Georgia, and I was able to see this swamp, and I must say that it was quite enjoyable and I had a good time.
I'm a slow director
Another thing happened: The film took longer to shoot than we had estimated. I was supposed to have shot it in — I don't know — forty days, and it was already the forty-fifth day and we were far from finishing it. I had a very slow cameraman, but it wasn't his fault; I was the one who was taking my time to shoot the film. One day they called in the cameraman to complain about his slowness. I protested: “Listen, the cameraman isn't slow, I am, I'm a slow director, and if you don't want a slow director, don't use me.” The cameraman became a very good friend of mine, by the way; he was very pleased with my attitude....
Here's what had happened: I had refused a story adapted from a well-known novel, and I had refused to use a star, although I certainly had some very good actors. I had Walter Huston; Dana Andrews, who played a stock boy; Anne Baxter, who played a stock girl; and Walter Brennan, who had received an Academy Award and was very well known. But they were character actors who played supporting roles, and at that time, the star system was very strict in Hollywood: A film that cost a certain amount had to offer audiences a star, a young lead of some importance. Since I had refused, my film automatically fell into the category of films that were to be made with only a limited amount of money. They therefore asked me to stop shooting, and so I stopped shooting the film and went home. That night, I received a phone call from Zanuck, who said to me, “No, no Jean; of course they were kidding, but I'm taking responsibility for it. I explained to the board of directors that despite the added cost, you're going to continue the film.” So the next morning I went back to continue shooting, and I received a show of affection that moved me tremendously, that shows that film people are really the same all over the world, and that they understand one another. When I arrived at the studio, at exactly 9 o'clock, which was the starting time of the shooting, I found the entire team in the middle of the set. Instead of being at their lights, the electricians were down below. The cameramen, the actors, the extras — everyone was there standing very formally, almost as if I were arriving at Elysée to visit the president of the republic, and when I opened the door, they all applauded me. There was a great deal of applause, and then we went to work. It was very nice."
— Renoir on Renoir by Jean Renoir (Cambridge University Press, 1989), translated by Carol Volk
1960s: favorite film(s) of each year
L'Avventura (1960) / La Dolce Vita (1960)
Killers on Parade (1961) / The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (1961)
Ivan's Childhood (1962)
High and Low (1963) / 8½ (1963)
Woman in the Dunes (1964)
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) / Red Beard (1965)
Andrei Rublev (1966)
Marketa Lazarová (1967)
Nanami: The Inferno of First Love (1968) / Shame (1968)
Eros + Massacre (1969) / The Cremator (1969)
Agnès Varda on Le Bonheur (1965):
"The movie is lyrical, with Mozart and the Île de France countryside of the Impressionists. To me, the film is like a beautiful summer fruit, seductive, a beautiful summer film—but you open it, and there’s a worm inside."
— The House That Agnès Built by Joan Dupont, Film Quarterly, Volume 72, Number 2 (Winter 2018)
Billy Wilder on Stanley Kubrick and his films:
Wilder: "I was at his house once, nice man. But a very strange man, he will not fly. The Shining [1980]—very smooth . . . and then there's that labyrinth. I love all his movies. Kubrick, he was a wonderful director, but sometimes . . . for instance I could never understand—and I cannot discuss it with anybody, because people have not seen that picture, that costume picture, Barry Lyndon [1975] . . ."
Cameron Crowe: "What about it?"
Wilder: "He worked like six months trying to find a way to photograph somebody by candlelight, not artificial light. And nobody really gives a shit whether it is by candlelight or not. What are the jokes? What is the story? I did not like it. That's the only Kubrick picture that I did not like, but look, what's the last one that he made?"
Cameron Crowe: "Full Metal Jacket [1987]."
Wilder: "The first half of Full Metal Jacket was the best picture I ever saw. Where the guy sits on the toilet and blows his head off? Terrific. Then he lost himself with the girl guerrilla. The second half, down a little. It's still a wonderful picture. You know, if he does a thing, he really does it. But this is . . . this is a career to discuss. Every picture, he trumps the trump. These are all pictures any director would be proud to be associated with, much less make. At a picture like The Bicycle Thief [1947], you forget that this is your profession. You just get lost in the picture."
Cameron Crowe: "What did you think of Dr. Strangelove [1964]?"
Wilder: "Oh, I love that. That's one of my favorite pictures, Dr. Strangelove. I was bewildered, but then I put some order in it, as I thought about it, and as I saw it again. It was a wonderful picture, but so was Lolita [1962]. She was a little too old. He had to make a little sacrifice there. I hear they've remade it again, getting the characters’ ages closer to the book. [Pause.] I'm ninety-one—I'm the right age. [Laughs.] But I don't know, except for Spartacus [1960], he did very good."
— Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999)
Krzysztof Kieślowski on Three Colors: Red (1994) being his last film:
"I don't know what else I could do. I've made all of these films, and I'm left with the feeling I'm constantly making the same film. Since 1987, I've made fourteen films. I've done more than my share. Now it's time to let others show what they can do."
— The Force of Chance: An Interview with Krzysztof Kieślowski by Patrick McGavin & Zbigniew Banas (1994), translated and reprinted on RogerEbert.com, (August 29, 2016)
Jean-Pierre Jeunet on the origin of Delicatessen (1991):
"The starting-point of the synopsis was simply that, at the time, I lived above a sausage-maker's and every morning I heard chopping. One day, my girlfriend said, ‘They're chopping up the tenants, it will be your turn soon.’ I told [Marc] Caro about this, and he thought it was a good starting-point. There was a title, Delicatessen, and so we started constructing a whole world around that one idea, including the characters and lots of things we'd been thinking about for ages. I sent the project to a producer, Claudie Hossard, who I'd met in the mean-time, and she said yes straight away."
— Jean-Pierre Jeunet, interviewed by Gilles Ciment, Philippe Rouyer and Paul-Louis Thirard, Positif, issue N° 364 (June 1991), reprinted in Projections 9: French Film-makers on Film-making, edited by Michel Ciment and Noël Herpe, translated by Pierre Hodgson (Faber and Faber, 1999)
Ingmar Bergman on the expression of sex in his films and his interest in the interior anatomy of love:
"For many years I was timid and conventional in the expression of sex in my films. But the manifestation of sex is very important, and particularly to me, for above all, I don’t want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them. There is much in common between a beautiful summer morning and the sexual act; but I feel I’ve found the cinematic means of expressing only the first, and not the other, as yet. What interests me more, however, is the interior anatomy of love. This strikes me as far more meaningful than the depiction of sexual gratification."
— Ingmar Bergman, interviewed by Cynthia Grenier, Playboy Magazine, vol. 11, no. 6 (June 1964)
John Huston on taking the audience outside itself and how film devices are inherent in the physiology of man:
"The ideal film, it seems to me, is when it's as though the projector were behind the beholder's eyes, and he throws onto the screen that which he wants to see. Films are usually very good for their first two or three minutes. The audience is completely taken outside of itself. They are not aware of themselves. And then comes that awful moment, when they become self-aware once more. It's the film that allows this to happen, of course. I think that one of the problems of the people who make films is that they have not realized that most of the devices of film are inherent in the physiology of man. I mean, all the things we have laboriously learned to do with film, were already part of the daily physiological and psychological experience of man before film was invented, and if we only knew how to make a bridge between these natural experiences and that which we put on the screens, we would be able to eliminate those dead moments, those dull and laborious times, when the human being begins to feel the distance between his real experience and that which is suggested to him via the screen. Let me make an experiment, maybe you will understand better what I mean. Move your eyes, quickly, from an object on one side of this room to an object on the other side. In a film you would use the cut. Watch! There—you did exactly what I expected: in moving your head from one side of the room to the other, you briefly closed your eyes. Try it again, in the other direction. There! You see, you do it automatically. Once you know the distance between the two objects, you blink instinctively. That's a cut. If you were to pan, like we could do with the camera or as you could do with your eyes, from one side to the other, passing all the objects on the way, and then back again, it would become tedious beyond endurance. This does it for you. In the same way, almost all the devices of film have a physiological counterpart. It's a matter of learning—again—to use it.
And you can look at most other filmic devices with this point of view. Take the dissolve. Your thoughts are changing. There's that moment of impingement of thoughts and images where you are aware of your surroundings, or perhaps looking at something else, outside your direct field of vision. Thoughts change while the things you see intermingle. And take the fade-out: that corresponds to sleep. It's an opportunity to rest, to change completely. Exactly as we use it in film."
— How I Make Films: An Interview with John Huston by Gideon Bachmann, Film Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Autumn 1965)
⬇️ John Huston, 1947
© Henri Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos
1950s: favorite film(s) of each year
Rashômon (1950)
Diary of a Country Priest (1951) / La poison (1951)
The Life of Oharu (1952)
Ugetsu (1953)
Sansho the Bailiff (1954) / Seven Samurai (1954)
Ordet (1955) / Pather Panchali (1955)
A Man Escaped (1956) / Aparajito (1956)
The Cranes are Flying (1957)
Vertigo (1958)
The World of Apu (1959) / The Human Condition I & II (1959)
Raoul Coutard on one of the rare times he and Jean-Luc Godard shot in a studio for A Woman Is a Woman (1961):
"I remember one of the very few occasions on which we worked in a studio. It was for the long interior sequence, made up of long takes, in Une Femme est une femme. The camera movements were to be so weird and so complicated that Godard had for once resigned himself to studio shooting.
Well, what is the point of a studio? How does it make the work easier? In a studio, for instance, one can lift up the wall at one’s back, to make room for the camera and a lamp or two. I wanted to do just that. Godard told me: “No. We mustn’t move the wall. When a husband watches his wife bringing in the joint she has burned, he can’t move the wall to bawl her out from further away. He stays in his chair and looks from there.”
Another advantage of the studio is that with extremely complicated scenes, of the kind we had in Une Femme est une femme, the set-builder can construct his set in such a fashion that the camera dolly can move more or less anywhere without too many problems for the cameraman. I told Godard: “Change the set, move those two posts further away from each other. I can’t get through.” His answer: “Out of the question. A young couple in a flat near the Porte Saint-Denis don’t live in rooms with acres of space. I’m talking about that sort of young couple. You’ll just have to manage.”
The third justification for a studio, and the essential one: the catwalks up in the roof to which one attaches the lights. We were making Une Femme est une femme in colour, and of course colour film stock at that time was slow, so we had to have at least some light to be able to see anything. So I lit the scene, with the lamps placed on the gantries which overhung the set – the sequence with Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy getting ready for bed. Godard sent me away, thought it over, called me back, told me a thousand or so new things, kept breaking off in the middle of sentences, referred to 20 films I hadn’t seen. I straightened out a few things, and we began. After a few seconds, Godard stopped everything. He said to Anna: “What on earth’s the matter with you? You don’t go to bed like that at home.”
He put himself in Anna’s place. Then he said: “We’re absolutely mad. We’re trying to film Anna going to bed in her room and there’s no ceiling. Anna has never slept in a room that hasn’t got a ceiling.” A ceiling, of course, is expensive. The producer asked Godard: “Will we see much of your ceiling in the film? Can’t you possibly do without it?” “We won’t see it,” Godard said, “but if there isn’t a ceiling Anna can’t do the scene. We must have a ceiling.”
So we had a ceiling. I had no more gantries, to light the room from; we couldn’t move the walls about; the set was fixed; we couldn’t have any lights. In fact, all the advantages of the studio had vanished, and in the end what we found ourselves left with was a real room, with all its problems. That is the last time that we went to the trouble and expense of a studio; because in the long run, in a real room, with someone like Godard, one has more of a free hand."
— Light of day: Raoul Coutard on shooting film for Jean-Luc Godard, Sight and Sound (Winter 1965-66 issue), translated by Michel Cournot
Éric Rohmer on his Six Moral Tales (1963–1972):
"In French there is a word moraliste that I don’t think has any equivalent in English. It doesn’t really have much connection with the word “moral,” a moraliste is someone who is interested in the description of what goes on inside man. He’s concerned with states of mind and feelings. For example in the eighteenth century Pascal was a moraliste, and a moraliste is a particularly French kind of writer like La Bruyère or La Rochefoucauld, and you could also call Stendhal a moraliste because he describes what people feel and think. So Contes Moraux doesn’t really mean that there’s a moral contained in them, even though there might be one and all the characters in these films act according to certain moral ideas that are fairly clearly worked out. In Ma Nuit chez Maud these ideas are very precise; for all the characters in the other films they are rather more vague, and morality is a very personal matter. But they try to justify everything in their behavior and that fits the word “moral” in its narrowest sense. But “moral” can also mean that they are people who like to bring their motives, the reasons for their actions, into the open, they try to analyze, and they are not people who act without thinking about what they are doing. What matters is what they think about their behavior, rather than their behavior itself. They aren’t films of action, they aren’t films in which physical action takes place, they aren’t films in which there is anything very dramatic, they are films in which a particular feeling is analyzed and where even the characters themselves analyze their feelings and are very introspective. That’s what Conte Morale means."
— Éric Rohmer, interviewed by Graham Petrie, Film Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Summer 1971)
Jacques Rivette on Hiroshima, mon amour (1959):
"Hiroshima is a circular film. At the end of the last reel you can easily move back to the first, and so on. Hiroshima is a parenthesis in time. It is a film about reflection, on the past and on the present. Now, in reflection, the passage of time is effaced because it is a parenthesis within duration. And it is within this duration that Hiroshima is inserted. In this sense Resnais is close to a writer like Borges, who has always tried to write stories in such a way that on reaching the last line the reader has to turn back and re-read the story right from the first line to understand what it is about — and so it goes on, relentlessly. With Resnais it is the same notion of the infinitesimal achieved by material means, mirrors face to face, series of labyrinths. It is an idea of the infinite but contained within a very short interval, since ultimately the 'time' of Hiroshima can just as well last twenty-four hours as one second."
— Jean Domarchi, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer: 'Hiroshima, notre amour', Cahiers du Cinéma No. 97 (July 1959), translated by Liz Heron
Toshio Matsumoto on the 1960s, institutional systems, and art's form of struggle against authority:
"Looking back on the 1960s as a whole, I think it was the most significant period of change in the 20th century alongside the 1920s. It was, more than anything else, a paradigm shift in ways of seeing and thinking, in sensibility and values. This was true of everything including art and documentary; all the old standards had become invalid. I think the fact many did not switch to a new framework produced a suffocating sense of oppression not only in Japan, but elsewhere in the world as well. That's why campus protests sparked by the Nanterre branch of the University of Paris in 1968 spread throughout the world like wildfire. I think the fact that these interlocking kinds of phenomena radiated out internationally must have reflected some synchronic essence. In the end, then, within the framework of the wartime and postwar structure, a new, unconstricted state of things manifested itself in many areas and generated conflict. It was this age of structural diastrophism that was the 1960s. There were great social and political transformations, but the question of values was enormous as well, one which I believe extended to the fields of culture and the arts.
The greatest harvest amidst all this was that the fact that everything is part of an institutional system became extremely clear. That means, for instance, that the way of looking at things changes according to the point of view—that it isn't determined from the start. For example, even the law of perspective in painting is a mode of perceiving space formulated by a way of looking at things established during a certain socio-historical turning point in the West; it becomes obvious that it, too, is an institutional system. In that way, even modes and forms of expression in art, including cinema, were in the end seen as being created institutionally. In fact, when the system loses momentum, these forms become naturalized; the process by which art begins to look natural when custom or inertia becomes a fixed norm is itself a system.
Anyway, that's how I started to think. And also about how to devour this system. As a political problem, the system is not only the power that oppresses people in this or that a way or visible forms of political repression. Power is also what systematizes our thought, feelings, art, and culture in invisible ways. If we don't become aware of this and shake its foundations, we cannot move the structure of power in a real sense. That's why, after an immediate postwar period in which things were largely put into motion by the direct collision of the political dynamics of authority vs. anti-authority, we came to be controlled by more invisible things like human consciousness, feelings, points of view, or values. I thought that the most pressing issue facing art was how to become aware of this and work to undermine the system as a form of customary inertia. Films that startle and arouse self-awareness of that kind of internal distortion change the condition of cinema itself—this I think is art's form of struggle against authority. In that sense, there is an immeasurable significance to the fact not just film, but the 1960s avant-garde art movement in general impelled the de-systemization of artistic expression, artists, viewers, and the visual culture system as a whole, including the condition of initially being completely unaware of responsibility for the war that I first problematized. Well, the disposition towards systemization is deeply rooted, so this issue has stayed with us until today without easy resolution."
— "Documentarists of Japan No. 9: Matsumoto Toshio", interviewed by Aaron Gerow, Documentary Box 9 (1996), Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival
