Film Directors From Wales

"This is the writing of Nagiko Kiyohara no Motosuke Sei Shonagon, and I know you to have blackmailed, violated and humiliated my father. I suspect you also of ruining my husband. You have now committed the greatest crime -- you have desecrated the body of my lover. You and I now know that you have lived long enough."

"In practically every film you experience, you can see the director following the text. Illustrating the words first, making the pictures after, and, alas, so often not making pictures at all, but holding up the camera to do its mimetic worst."

"The cinema is about other things than storytelling. What you remember from a good film -- and let's only talk about good films -- is not the story, but a particular and hopefully unique experience that is about atmosphere, ambience, performance, style, an emotional attitude, gestures, singular events, a particular audio-visual experience that does not rely on the story."

"John Cage, composer, painter, and all-round thinker and cultural catalyst, said that if you introduce twenty percent of novelty into any artwork, watch out -- you are going to lose eighty percent of your audience at once. He said you would lose them for fifteen years. Cage was interested in fifteen-year cycles. But he was hopelessly optimistic. The general appreciation, for example, of Western painting has got stuck around Impressionism, and that was 130 years ago, not fifteen years ago."

"The film has written and spoken dialogue in twenty-five languages-English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Latin, Hebrew, necrotic Egyptian … and it has written calligraphic text on paper, wood, and flesh, on flat and curved surfaces, vertically and horizontally, on both living and dead flesh, in neon, on screens, in projection, as sub-title, inter-title, and sur-title, as High Art and low art, as advertisement and banker's check and registration plate, on photograph, on blackboard, as letter correspondence, as photocopy facsimile, and spoken, chanted, and sung, with and without music … a mocking challenge. You want text? Cinema wants text? Cinema pretends to eschew text? Then we can give you text to mock that smug suggestion that cinema thinks it is pictures."

"Why illustrate a great piece of writing whose very advocacy and evocation and efficacy lies within its very existence as writing?"

"Get the Titanic sailing correctly before you worry about the deck chairs."

"Perhaps, sadly, in the end, cinema is only a translator's art, and you know what they say about translators: traitors all."

"If every man is supposed to think of sex once every nine minutes, what on earth does he think of in the other eight?"

"There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film -- certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation."

"All the material is fictional and develops its own eight and a half private, coelesced journeys, where, perhaps not unexpectedly, the females can run faster than the men and trade their freedoms by exhausting the male sexual fantasies and replacing them by some of their own."

"The film begins with a visual list of eight and a half Japanese Pachinko Parlours filmed in several Japanese cities -- Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto."

"These buildings are just right for the excesses of post-modernism -- decorative, frivolous -- serving to obviously excite and attract -- every feature using the architectural vocabulary freely without too much regard for serious function -- open glass atriums and shining metals and expensive and artificial marbles, zany letterings and excess neon."

"Then I think you have a choice -- please your mother or face criminal charges."

"To a man of honour that is no choice."

"Benedictus bene dicap bene asian christian dominum nostrum amen."

"I like sleeping. (after a pause) You were conceived in this bed."

"You weren't asleep then."

"No -- but I have a feeling your mother was."

"I loved Latin -- the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history -- but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it. … In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin -- a subject I loved -- really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved."

"All this narcissism is rather boring, isn't it?"

"When I was young I hated my body because it was so thin -- now I try not to look at it too much because it's so old. There perhaps might have been just six months when I felt comfortable with it -- when I discovered alcohol for the first time and learnt to drive and was fattening out and had just met your mother."

"I don't know what to say really -- except that you look immortal and I look bereft."

"You know to make his rigid, tedious, boring paintings seem at least a little human, the Mondrian enthusiasts keep insisting that Mondrian was a great tango dancer."

"I never go to the cinema. I can't stand sitting in the dark with strangers -- all of us obliged to share the same emotional experiences -- it's too intimate. I like to be emotional in private."

"The penis -- if you think about it -- is the most enterprising engineering feat imaginable -- a cantilevered structure, hydraulics, propulsion, pistons, compression, inflation, heat sensitive -- practically every engineering characteristic -- towers, draw-bridges, rocket-ships -- no man-made engineering structure to match it."

"Money's not interesting -- too easy to get hold of."

"Too many stupid people have it."

"You have no right to be jealous of a woman who wants to be more of a woman by watching a man dressed up as a woman."

"Complicated eh?"

"Imagine a world where nothing is stable. In the West, we have three moving elements -- Air, Fire, Water -- but at least we can depend on the fourth."

"Imagine a world without a fixed point."

"I can -- your mother's dead."

"I would be curious about one of those Jane Austen women -- you know -- long-suffering, dutiful -- but all right in the end -- a plump 19th century type, five foot four, ringlets, brown eyes, long fingers."

"Raw sex is the last thing you are going to encounter in a Jane Austen woman."

"Rubbish -- absolute rubbish!"

"A long white dress that starts under the breast and travels on interminably down -- so their legs are entirely mysterious -- they could have one leg or two inside that dress... A Jane Austen woman could be incredibly passionate inside that dress."

"And you would never know if she had feet."

"We must ask Kito to come over."

"No we mustn't! She'll have us all audited."

"You can say with safety that nowadays women have finally acknowledged their position of not liking men. We could say now that women don't like men. They can acknowledge that they prefer the company of their own kind. I think we can also say generally that most men do not like other men. Most men prefer to like women. So women are the most liked by the most people. Men love women, women love children, and children love hamsters. A one-way slide. There is little going back the other way. Can hamsters love children? I leave you to deduce the rest."

"The range of human skin colours is quite narrow when you think about it -- and I do -- and subtle -- beige, pink, white, tan, taupe, ..."

"Taupe? What sort of colour is "taupe"? It sounds like a Malaysian ground sloth encountered once every fifty years by one of the Attenboroughs wearing long socks."

"It's like Shelley. Like Werther. Like a Japanese Ophelia. Like a beautiful Oriental Lady in the Lake."

"Naked! So I can see no pranks and ruses."

"What quaint English. They make an unpredictable linguistic duo."

"It's sort of cathartic -- the naked exposure -- don't you think? You couldn't do it voluntarily -- could you? It's under duress -- so somehow legitimate. Circumstances beyond our control. I think I enjoyed that."

"1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37 ..."

"I have always had severe problems with Austrians. … Musical, churchy, uptight... nice legs... hypocritical... authoritarian... always insist their dustbins are very clean."

"There is another earthquake in Kyoto. We appreciate it lyrically. A slide of dust slips along a roof gully. A large tree of golden petals shakes and the petals drift to the floor. Birds fly up. Bottles of clear liquid in a shop quiver on a shelf. The water in a puddle shimmers reflections up a wall. A collection of grey roof tiles shift and -- ever faster -- begin to slide down a roof slope."