Taste of Cinema

pickledelephant:

Joel & Ethan Coen while filming Raising Arizona (1987)

Martin Scorsese on the set of Who’s that knocking at my door.

(Source: jimmyconways)

“For ten years we had all been told to go out and die for freedom and democracy; but now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art.” — Michael Powell

strangewood:

Leslie Cheung
September 12, 1956 –- April 1, 2003

“Leslie Cheung was a great artist and a true friend. Through all the days we worked together, we shared great moments and the occasional different point of view. This is because we are all dreamers. […] Leslie used to jokingly call himself a legend. We, too, called him by this name. But no one had ever imagined a legend would be consummated this way. We will always remember him.” — Wong Kar-wai

strangewood:

Shohei Imamura
September 15, 1926 -– May 30, 2006

“It is a lot easier to be obedient and stay with the establishment, but this is not my way of life. I always try to change society completely with my films. Of course, filmmaking is not like catch. You can throw the ball but there is no guarantee that it will be caught.”

strangewood:

“You’re looking for some artistic connection, not an affair. But in the end I think that directors fall in love with their actors. The films that have come out well for me are the ones where I felt the director loved me. Not me, but the woman I’m playing. There has to be that love, somehow. That’s why a lot of actors and directors end up together in real life.”

Maggie Cheung (Born September 20, 1964)

strangewood:

Robert Bresson
September 25, 1901 — December 18, 1999

“I don’t think much of technique, or making technique a part of things. If you find a new way to catch life, nature, this could change details, but not the whole. I don’t think so much of what I do when I work, but I try to feel something, to see without explaining, to catch it as near as I can—that’s all. And that’s why I don’t move so much. It’s like approaching a wild animal. If you are too brusque about it, it will run away. I think you must think a lot in the intervals of working and writing, but when you work, you mustn’t think anymore. Thinking is a terrible enemy. You should try to work not with your intelligence, but with your senses and your heart. With your intuition.”

strangewood:

Pedro Almodóvar
Born September 25, 1949

“When I make a film, I never stop uncovering mysteries, making discoveries. When I’m writing, filming, editing, even doing promotional work, I discover new things about the film, about myself, and about others. That is what I’m subconsciously looking for when shooting a film: to glimpse the enigmas of life, even if I don’t resolve them, but at least to uncover them. Cinema is curiosity in the most intense meaning of the word.”

2or3thingsiknowaboutfilm:

Brian De Palma
Born September 11, 1940

“I wanted to learn how to tell stories in pictures, and suspense movies were the best way to do it. Where you have very simple situations: the monster’s going to get you, or somebody’s going to kill you, or how to get rid of a body. And you have to figure out ways to make that exciting visually. That’s how I developed the long visual sequences that fascinate me to this day.”

— Brian De Palma on transitioning from avant-garde comedies to thrillers, 2007

criterioncollection:

“Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as  Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for surprise and for topping one joke with a bigger one; a knack for rooting out archetypes  hitherto untouched in movies; and a penchant for making films that feel like pageants, composed of a democratically diverse cross section of humanity.”

— Kent Jones, The Royal Tenenbaums: Faded Glories

strangewood:

“One time everybody went to lunch except Orson and me. He had said he wasn’t hungry, so I’d said the same to keep him company. Ten minutes after we were alone, he said, “Are you hungry? I’m absolutely starving!” I admitted I was too, so we went into the kitchen and from the top of the refrigerator he pulled the largest bag of Fritos I had ever seen, ripped off a two-inch strip across the top of the bag, splashed out a large portion onto the kitchen table, sat, took a huge handful, and shoved it into his mouth. I did exactly the same and we sat there chewing seriously for several minutes before Orson could finally manage to say, confidentially, still chewing, and with a gleefully manic look: “You know… you don’t gain weight… if nobody sees you eating!”

— Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles [x]

strangewood:

“Even as a child, I always loved cinema and was thrilled when my parents would take me before the war. Then we were put into the ghetto in Krakow and there was no cinema, but the Germans often showed newsreels to the people outside the ghetto, on a screen in the market place. And there was one particular corner where you could see the screen through the barbed wire. I remember watching with fascination, although all they were showing was the German army and German tanks, with occasional anti-Jewish slogans inserted on cards. When I escaped from the ghetto, the first thing I looked forward to was the cinema.”

Roman Polanski (born August 18, 1933)

strangewood:

“Actually, I can’t stand watching violent scenes in films; I avoid watching horror films. I don’t tend to watch action films mainly because I find them boring, but I watch the films of David Cronenberg and Martin Scorsese, usually in a state close to having a heart attack. I’m a complete coward. I make violent films as a result of my sensitivity to violence—in other words, my fear of violence.”

Park Chan-wook (born August 23, 1963)