 And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world. |
| If I couldn't read, I couldn't live. |
| I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley. |
| If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason. |
| My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life. |
| A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do. |
| Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye. |
| So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less. |
| Ross Hunter was my assistant on Take Me to Town, He was a young man, an actor before that, and learned a lot on the picture. During shooting, Goldstein left, and Ross was most pleasant. He never interfered. |
| Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after. |
| For a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty. |
| These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition. |
| Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals. |
| At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political. |
| The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy. |
| I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style. |
| And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble. |
| Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic. |
| You have to think with the heart. |
| But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them. |
