Film Directors From The United States

"I think I’m going to continue, not so much to remind people or myself, but continue to play parts that allow me to express some meaning or some understanding of what it means to be a person."

"Well, all art is therapeutic and a positive place to transmute emotions from the negative into a positive."

"I think this quarantine experience, and the fear of the pandemic itself, only augments the closeness we feel with our animal brothers and sisters. It’s interesting timing that this movie is coming out as we slowly begin to emerge from that experience. I was already close with my animals, but it only made us closer because I really needed their support during that time."

"I wanted to create a kind of wild and artistic and bizarre image. I have changed in terms of what I want to express, and what I want my perception to be. But I personally think I’m very boring. I find myself perfectly content staying at home and playing with my cats or spending time with my boys, who are now older and into their own interests."

"There was something wonderful about being able to look up and see what that physical representation was going to look like. It is one of the things that I miss, now that we’re in a much more digital age."

"From a cinema major’s perspective, philosophically, theoretically it’s easier for people to imprint on that character what they think they’re feeling. I don’t know why, but it seems easier for kids to identify with someone like Ferb, or Perry, when they say nothing."

"The Murder of Charlie Kirk is heartbreaking"

"Eradicate the sick fuck now!"

"Eradicate Chuck Kirk & his kind!"

"We will eradicate Donald J Trump and all those who enable him"

"I want to live in a country where Colin Kaepernick is seen as a hero and Kyle Rittenhouse is seen as a terrorist."

"This tragedy is overwhelming to all of us .. it's deeply saddening to my client. This idea my client grabbed the gun and handed it to Baldwin absolutely did not happen. The armorer brought the weapon in The armorer opens the firearm... [Halls] didn't load it."

"I want to start with the fact that in the affidavit it states that my client grabbed the gun off of a prop cart and handed it to Baldwin. That absolutely did not happen. That ABSOLUTELY did not happen. In addition to me presenting not only what Mister Halls has told me, we, our defense team, has interviewed witnesses and some of those witnesses that we've talked to, when we talked to them, they hadn't even been interviewed by the police yet. And those witnesses also confirm that they remember that the armer or the armer's assistant brought in the firearm, brought it onto the set. So this idea that my client grabbed the gun off of a prop cart and handed it Mister Baldwin absolutely did not happen. .. Okay, one of the problems that some of the witnesses have had is that, um... most of the crew knew each other, but not all of the crew knew the armers. So the armers were relatively new to this particular crew, and both of the armer and the assistant armer were women in their twenties. And so some of the witnesses are getting confused whether the armer came in or the assistant armer. But regardless whether it was the armer that brought the firearm on the set or the assistant armer that brought the firearms on set, my client did not bring the armer .. did not bring the firearm on set. He did not grab it from.. I have received information from crew members that the armer handed it directly to Baldwin, and then Baldwin put it inside where his, uh, holster would be, and then at some point he pulled the firearm out and he wanted to adjust, um, the holster, and then he hands the firearm to Mister Halls who immediately hands it right back after he's adjusted the holster. Other witnesses have said that, um, that the armer brought the firearm in, that they checked the firearm, that my client checked the firearm, there was another crew member who checked the firearm, and that she handed it to him like a pass-through, and that he then handed it immediately over to Baldwin because he was between the two. So I can't tell you verbatim what happened: these people are overwhelmed by the grief and the shock."

"Halyna Hutchins was not just one of the most talented people I’ve worked with, but also a friend. I’m shocked and saddened by her death. It’s my hope that this tragedy prompts the industry to reevaluate its values and practices to ensure no one is harmed through the creative process again."

"When pressed further, the attorney said she has spoken to some crew members who remember Gutierrez-Reed handing the weapon to Baldwin while others recall seeing Halls pass it to the actor directly after being passed the weapon by Gutierrez-Reed himself."

"According to authorities in Santa Fe, four people handled the gun before the shooting: Baldwin, Halls, Gutierrez-Reed and prop master Sarah Zachry, according to Fox News."

"The reason I created Jimmy in the first place was I’ve always been a huge fan of science and technology and space, but I was never smart enough to actually become an astronaut or become a scientist — my math skills aren’t strong enough."

"She had this amazing background that you just sort of instantly romanticize. She had this whole Ukrainian vibe that made her seem both super cool and serious about truth."

"No. That was no good. That was no good at all."

"Right now, I'm just really interested in finding fruitful collaborations. To me, it’s the collaborative effort between creative minds that elevates each other’s work."

"One thing I learned is that cinematography is not something you do by yourself. It’s a group [project]. You need to develop your own vision, but the key to a successful film is communication with your director and your team."

"Stanley Kubrick and are the only ones that appeal to me—except for the old masters. By which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.[...] With Ford at his best, you feel that the movie has lived and breathed in a real world."

"The only director who does not move either his camera or his actors very much, and in whom I believe, is John Ford. He succeeds in making me believe in his films even though there is little movement in them. But with the others I have the impression that they are desperately trying to make Art."

"You won't like what I am going to say, because the people who I admire are the least-valued by cinema intellectuals; it seems like a tragic misunderstanding to me. My favorite filmmaker is De Sica: I know I'm upsetting you. And John Ford. But the Ford of twenty years ago, the De Sica of twelve years ago."

"As for the director, John Ford, from my first meeting with him to the day the picture was completed I knew I was in the hands of the consummate professional. I felt safe and secure with him. If I argued a line of dialogue with him or objected to a bit of business, I can now assure you it was more to assert my ego than it was to attack him. Almost entirely throughout the film, when we clashed, it turned out he was right and I was wrong. The main point to be made is that he would sit me down and show me where I was wrong. He is a totally remarkable director and one of the few deserving a place in the Pantheon. I'm told he's aging now, and cranky; well, I'm aging now, and cranky, but I bet if the right script came along (and were still around to write it), John Ford and I could knock the shit out of it."

"Very early, I was a film buff.... I learned from everything. You learn for just meeting John Ford."

"I've only been influenced by somebody once: prior to making Citizen Kane, I saw Stagecoach forty times. I didn't need to learn from somebody who had something to say, but from somebody who would show me how to say what I had in mind; and John Ford is perfect for that."

"This man directs less than any man in the business. As a matter of fact, he doesn't direct—he doesn't want any actor to give an impression of him playing the part. He wants the actor to create the part—that's why he hired him, because he saw him in this part."

"John Ford was the quintessential American director, an intuitive film maker with no intellectual pretensions who made movies as he wanted to make them, and in the end found them to be as popular with the buffs as with the general public. ... And the true test-of his genius is the fact, that, as cinema fashions have come and gone, his reputation has seldom faltered."

"Godard and [[Ingmar Bergman|[Ingmar] Bergman]] have always admired him, Mr Nixon says he loved him and those who have nothing but disrespect for the average commercial movie will seldom hear a word against John Ford. Yet at the same time he has also been accused of everything under the sun from being a political reactionary to a moral sentimentalist. There was no doubt that he could make awful movies that extolled the American way of life in the most simplistic way. There was no doubt also that the old values of rough frontiersman integrity suited him best..."

"I only met John Ford once. On the steps of MGM one evening. We were introduced by mutual friends. People spend a lot of time comparing my work to his. Most of that's bullshit. First of all, I don't like most of his later films. I love The Informer and Grapes of Wrath and—what was that other one?—Tobacco Road. His best Western is '. Fonda was sensational in that. I hated '. I loved the book but I thought the movie was shit. But I suppose he didn't like much of what I did, either. I think we're very different."

"Maureen O'Hara is one of the actresses I most dislike. Everybody thought I was her lover. Actually, I hated her and she hated me, but she was right for the parts."

"I never make visual references to Ford in my films, but I did remind my cameraman of Ford's very economical use of the close-up and careful handling of space. The first close-up of John Wayne in ' comes after 40 minutes! One of the top stars of the time! Still, he is incredibly powerful and present in the film. So I tried to do something similar here, partly in reaction to so many films shot today in the style of TV. I wanted to do an intimate story in wide shots, and it seemed appropriate, because the audacious use of space would emphasize the historical dimensions. That's also Ford, because my film is about values, and Ford's always are, too. Ford is one of the few classic American directors whose emphasis is on the collective rather than on the individual. I have read critics who believe he is reactionary, but they forget not only how nonjudgmental he is; he has a sense of the group's responsibility, of their mutual need. In ', John Wayne says, "This is work for a professional," but not in Yellow Ribbon, where they come and say, "How can we help?"."

"Sometimes Ford failed to grasp the meaning of a question that a European director, or American directors like Elia Kazan, Richard Brooks, , or would have had no trouble assimilating. For example: How do you direct your actors? Ford couldn't understand the rationale for such a question. It seemed truly odd to him. Not dumb--like the radio journalist who asked him about "Fantastic Ride" [La Chevauchee fantastique is the French release title of Stagecoach]--but odd, and he didn't know what to answer. Since he was physically rather intimidating, with his one eye that seemed to peer deep inside of you and his piratelike countenance, even the bold could easily get flustered."

"The people who say such things are crazy. I am a Northerner, I hate segregation, and I gave jobs to hundreds of Negroes at the same salary the whites were paid. I had production companies hire poverty-stricken Indians and pay them the highest Hollywood salaries for extras. Me, a racist? My best friends are black: , and a caretaker who has worked for me for thirty years. I even made ', about a character who was not just a nice black guy but someone nobler than anybody else in the picture. They wouldn't let me make that picture because they said that a movie about a 'nigger' wouldn't make any money and couldn't be exhibited in the South. I got angry and told them they could at least have the decency to say 'Negro' or 'colored man,' because most of those 'niggers' were worth better than they. When I landed at there were scores of black bodies lying in the sand. Then I realized that it was impossible not to consider them full-fledged American citizens."

"Do you know that Eugene O'Neill loved ' [(1940), based on a cycle of O'Neill's one-act sea plays]? Every month he had a print screened for him. It's a little thing that made me very proud of this picture."

"What? [...] I understood the question but what does it mean? [...] I don't have a method. I tell them what to do. They do it. If I'm not satisfied, I correct their errors, I tell them to raise their voice, or to emphasize such-and-such sentence, and they do it again; that's all. Anyway, most of the time the actors are very good friends of mine and I know their personality and their range. There's no method involved there.""

"Never. It's awful. When I am asked why I hardly ever move the camera, I answer that the actors are better paid than the stagehands and grips, so it's normal that they should work and move about a little more. You should never use technical gimmicks to create emotion."

"John Ford came in and I was very scared of him. A rough character. I heard he despised the English, so I invented an Irish grandfather and told tales to him that simply were not true. [...] I found Ford to be a very curmudgeonly taskmaster, but always very fair. He always knew what he wanted in a scene. He never overshot. God help you if you didn't deliver what he wanted. And he liked me well enough that I finally told him that my Irish grandfather was fictional. He roared over that one. We've been close friends ever since. He used me a lot over the next few decades."

"I think "laconic" is a good word for John Ford and for his technique of direction. No big deal about communication with John. Terse, pithy, to the point. Very Irish, a dark personality, a sensitivity which he did everything to conceal, but once he said to me while I was doing a scene with Ray Massey, "Make it scan, Mary." And I said to myself, "Aha! I know you now!"."

"He didn't direct you. He never told you what to do. He would talk to you, mostly about something completely different, and you find yourself doing the right thing. It was really very spooky—what he did."

"Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath and the subsequent John Ford movie promulgated a populist mythology about depression-era migrants to California who were dubbed "Okies," no matter what southwestern or midwestern state they hailed from. But most Californians regarded Okies as dirty, shifty, lazy, violent, and ignorant."

"A good picture, as we all know, starts with a story. The next thing is to tell that story pictorially. [...] Fast-moving, pictorial, not overloaded with dialogue. You could see that picture without dialogue and know what it was all about. That was the secret of John Ford's pictures. You could run any one of his pictures silent, and you'd still know what they were all about."

"He was the first to dare use very lengthy long takes, going against Hollywood rules. He wouldn't cut to a closer shot. No one has been able to generate as much emotion as Ford does in long shots; watch The Grapes of Wrath and Young Mr. Lincoln."

"I keep up on the news, and there's all this noise out there, with all of the media and people on their phones all the time. I think we've become a schizophrenic culture primarily as a result of the genie getting out of the bottle with all this media stuff."

"You don’t survive as a screenwriter-for-hire if you’re not willing to incorporate other people’s ideas or at least be willing to consider them. What I’ve found is that other people have really good ideas, which make you look better. It’s part of the process. At all stages of production, including pre- and post-, your film is going to change because it’s being shaped by all these people and ideas."

"Hollywood, of course, expected women to be collaborative, but had no intention of rewarding them for it. So she stayed independent. (Hollywood's ignorance of Joan Micklin Silver's talents and ambition)"

"The pathbreaking movie director Joan Micklin Silver got to have a career that almost no woman was allowed to have, and did not get to have the career that she deserved. Such is the paradox of the pioneer: You get to go where very few have gone before, but when you get there, there’s nobody to pull you up or push you ahead. You make your own way, and withstand the indifference, the hostility, the condescension, and the people who treat you as a curiosity or a slightly troubling anomaly."

"We were so young and had never produced anything, and Joan was infinitely patient and remarkably assured on the set. We learned so much about movies from her. And she really knew how to talk to actors. John [Heard] could be tricky — he was moody and had a tough reputation. But he never gave her a moment of trouble. (memories of the production of Chilly Scenes of Winter)"

"Abstract notions of feminism never interested Joan; specific women and their stories did. Yet without setting out to do so, Joan Silver influenced generations of women to come. She was a trail-blazer, a risk-taker, a champion of other women directors. And always as quietly confident as she was the day I met her some fifty years ago."