Famous Film Directors Quotes

Cinematographer.” Such an ornate term, yet still so vague. I often wonder if that’s to blame for how overlooked we are as a profession. Or even worse, that dry title, “Director of Photography.” But we are the true artists. A director may quite literally call the shots, but it is the cinematographer that makes them. We choose the angles, the lighting, pretty much everything that you see on the screen. The camera is a brush, and we are the hand, the arm, the eye. The director’s basically just the mouth, making pointless noise while the hand does the actual work. Almost every famous director that you know who has a distinctive visual style has simply managed to lock down a talented DoP.

Jones, along with the US military attaché in Indonesia, took Subandrio’s advice. He emphasized to Washington that the United States should support the Indonesian military as a more effective, long-term anticommunist strategy. The country of Indonesia couldn’t be simply broken into pieces to slow down the advance of global socialism, so this was a way that the US could work within existing conditions. This strategic shift would begin soon, and would prove very fruitful. But behind the scenes, the CIA boys dreamed up wild schemes. On the softer side, a CIA front called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funded literary magazines and fine arts around the world, published and distributed books in Indonesia, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm and the famous anticommunist collection The God That Failed.33 And the CIA discussed simply murdering Sukarno. The Agency went so far as to identify the “asset” who would kill him, according to Richard M. Bissell, Wisner’s successor as deputy director for plans.34 Instead, the CIA hired pornographic actors, including a very rough Sukarno look-alike, and produced an adult film in a bizarre attempt to destroy his reputation. The Agency boys knew that Sukarno routinely engaged in extramarital affairs. But everyone in Indonesia also knew it. Indonesian elites didn’t shy away from Sukarno’s activities the way the Washington press corps protected philanderers like JFK. Some of Sukarno’s supporters viewed his promiscuity as a sign of his power and masculinity. Others, like Sumiyati and members of the Gerwani Women’s Movement, viewed it as an embarrassing defect. But the CIA thought this was their big chance to expose him. So they got a Hollywood film crew together.35 They wanted to spread the rumor that Sukarno had slept with a beautiful blond flight attendant who worked for the KGB, and was therefore both immoral and compromised. To play the president, the filmmakers (that is, Bing Crosby and his brother Larry) hired a “Hispanic-looking” actor, and put him in heavy makeup to make him look a little more Indonesian. They also wanted him bald, since exposing Sukarno—who always wore a hat—as such might further embarrass him. The idea was to destroy the genuine affection that young Sakono, and Francisca, and millions of other Indonesians, felt for the Founding Father of their country. The thing was never released—not because this was immoral or a bad idea, but because the team couldn’t put together a convincing enough film.36

Beethoven and Paul McCartney cited dreams as the spark behind some of their musical compositions (including McCartney’s famous “Yesterday”). Some of the most recognizable sequences in film—sections of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Fellini’s 8 ½, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life—are translations of the directors’ dreams. Mary Shelley credited dreams with inspiring Frankenstein; E. B. White with Stuart Little.

For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.

Barbary Coast was rather a mess when Howard Hawks took over direction of a film initially assigned by Sam Goldwyn to William Wyler. Hawks was famous—and sometimes notorious—for rewriting scripts on the set, inviting his actors to contribute lines. At the same time, he was loath to cede his authority, or to allow actors to take over a production. Meta Carpenter, Hawks’s secretary and sometime script supervisor, vividly recalled how curt—even insulting—the director could be. “Shut up, Walter,” Hawks barked after Brennan apparently offered one too many suggestions. Carpenter never forgot the sight of the deflated actor, who took a day to recover from this rebuff. But Walter was resilient and adaptable. He later told his granddaughter Claudia that he survived the exhausting work of filmmaking by taking catnaps during breaks. He could sleep anywhere on anything—even a coil of rope.

The ghastly mother-in-law is well represented by a little comedy film of 1952: No Room for the Groom, directed by Douglas Sirk, the fine German director more famous for his melodramas that humanely criticize American morals and values.

1950 crime film, Side Street. The original had a famous car chase in and around Wall Street, shot from choppers and the tops of buildings. This time, they’re using drones, and we’ll be closing half a dozen streets over the weekend for the shoot. I haven’t met the director yet, just the DP and some assistants, but the lead was there—Leonardo DiCaprio!

There’s another level at which attention operates, this has to do with leadership, I argue that leaders need three kinds of focus, to be really effective, the first is an inner focus, let me tell you about a case that’s actually from the annals of neurology, there was a corporate lawyer, who unfortunately had a small prefrontal brain tumour, it was discovered early, operated successfully, after the surgery though it was a very puzzling picture, because he was absolutely as smart as he had been before, a very high IQ, no problem with attention or memory, but he couldn’t do his job anymore, he couldn’t do any job, in fact he ended up out of work, his wife left him, he lost his home, he’s living in his brother spare bedroom and in despair he went to see a famous neurologist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio specialized in the circuitry between the prefrontal area which is where we consciously pay attention to what matters now, where we make decisions, where we learn and the emotional centers in the midbrain, particularly the amygdala, which is our radar for danger, it triggers our strong emotions. They had cut the connection between the prefrontal area and emotional centers and Damasio at first was puzzled, he realized that this fellow on every neurological test was perfectly fine but something was wrong, then he got a clue, he asked the lawyer when should we have our next appointment and he realized the lawyer could give him the rational pros and cons of every hour for the next two weeks, but he didn’t know which is best. And Damasio says when we’re making a decision any decision, when to have the next appointment, should I leave my job for another one, what strategy should we follow, going into the future, should I marry this fellow compared to all the other fellows, those are decisions that require we draw on our entire life experience and the circuitry that collects that life experience is very base brain, it’s very ancient in the brain, and it has no direct connection to the part of the brain that thinks in words, it has very rich connectivity to the gastro- intestinal tract, to the gut, so we get a gut feeling, feels right, doesn’t feel right. Damasio calls them somatic markers, it’s a language of the body and the ability to tune into this is extremely important because this is valuable data too - they did a study of Californian entrepreneurs and asked them “how do you make your decisions?”, these are people who built a business from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and they more or less said the same strategy “I am a voracious gatherer of information, I want to see the numbers, but if it doesn’t feel right, I won’t go ahead with the deal”. They’re tuning into the gut feeling. I know someone, I grew up in farm region of California, the Central Valley and my high school had a rival high school in the next town and I met someone who went to the other high school, he was not a good student, he almost failed, came close to not graduating high school, he went to a two-year college, a community college, found his way into film, which he loved and got into a film school, in film school his student project caught the eye of a director, who asked him to become an assistant and he did so well at that the director arranged for him to direct his own film, someone else’s script, he did so well at that they let him direct a script that he had written and that film did surprisingly well, so the studio that financed that film said if you want to do another one, we will back you. And he, however, hated the way the studio edited the film, he felt he was a creative artist and they had butchered his art. He said I am gonna do the film on my own, I’m gonna finance it myself, everyone in the film business that he knew said this is a huge mistake, you shouldn’t do this, but he went ahead, then he ran out of money, had to go to eleven banks before he could get a loan, he managed to finish the film, you may have seen

Lesser is back in New York. He’d been in Paris for two months working as a gofer for the film director Maurice Barraque. To Lesser and his fellow Francophile cineastes, every one of Barraque’s films is a revelation. Beginning in the late sixties Barraque had directed and starred in his own films, all made for nothing, in circumstances that were as haphazard as they were abject. His best works were bolts of genius quickly written, hastily shot and never revised. He was a beautiful drug addict, a poet and painter of light and sound. Onscreen, he was as luminous a presence as the great beauties of European cinema who played opposite him. They worked for nothing, they expected nothing - half of his films were never finished. It was a career famous for disappointment and disaster: Cinema is haunted. We do not watch it, it watches us. But suddenly, late in life he’d had an improbable, unexpected renaissance and began churning out, year after year, small-scale diary-like films. He became almost respectable. All he required was a 16-mm camera, a handful of actors, a few rooms for them to move about in. And, of course, the streets of Paris.

Iron Man‘s success more than made up for that July’s Incredible Hulk. The result of Marvel’s most difficult production right up to the present, the second Hulk film starred Ed Norton, who proved a terrible fit for Maisel and Feige’s philosophy that studio executives should be the ultimate creative authority. Undeniably one of the best actors of his generation, Norton is also famous in Hollywood for being “difficult” and highly opinionated, refusing to allow artistic choices he disagrees with and seeking to rewrite scripts he doesn’t like, which is what he did on The Incredible Hulk. The clashes intensified in post-production, and the director, Louis Letterier, sided with Norton over the studio. They both learned who has the ultimate power at Marvel, though, when Feige took control of editing. He excised many of the darkest scenes, including a suicide attempt meant to portray how much the scientist Bruce Banner wants to rid himself of the curse of transforming into the Hulk when he’s mad. The resulting movie was still darker and more dramatic than any other Marvel Studios production and not different enough from the Hulk movie of 2003. It grossed only $263 million at the box office and barely broke even, the worst performance for any Marvel Studios film to date. The Incredible Hulk never got a sequel, but the character has returned in Avengers films, played by the easygoing Mark Ruffalo. The usually cheerful Feige stated that the decision to recast the role was “rooted in the need for an actor who embodies the creativity and collaborative spirit of our other talented cast members.