A Commonplace Book

...we go about our business or we take to dope, the dope which is worse by far than opium or hashish--I mean the newspapers, the radio, the movies. Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do.

"You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood."

For commercial reasons the film's [Dr. Caligari] producers changed the ending -- which had originally involved Francis's unmasking of Caligari -- so that Francis's 'anti-social paranoia' about those in power would not harm the public.

[of film writing]: "And the best short scene I ever wrote, by my own judgement, was one in which a girl said "uh-huh" three times with three different intonations, and that's all there was to it."

'The search' is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up.

By embodying an aspiration, a reaching for an alternative to the existing order, beauty can challenge the present -- but only if, as Godard's does, it acknowledges rather than dissembles the activity and the conditions that make for it.

Defeat is always glorious on film. The loser is ennobled by suffering and death. No camera can resist the man going down to defeat. He commands every mechanism and the attention of every mind.

[Hollywood] is a place where they pay you 50,000 dollars for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul.

Movies are action. In movies things happen. You are what you do. What's inside your head means nothing until you act. Gesture, expression, action. You don't think. You act. You react. To things. Events. You make things happen. You make your history and your future. You cut the wires that defuse the bomb, you lay out the villain, you save the community, you throw your badge into the dirt and walk away, you fold your arms around the girl and slowly fade to black. You never have to think. Your eyes might dart from the alien monster to the fizzing power cables as a plan comes to you, but you never have to think. The perfect stage hero is Hamlet. The perfect film hero is Lassie.

   An historian finds it difficult to re-see films after their initial releases and his memory is not always reliable. I can offer various examples of the fallibility of memory.

   The film which made the strongest impression on me at the end of the "silent" period was Sternberg's Underworld (1927). I therefore felt it important to discuss it in detail with my students at the IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, Paris) where I taught film history with Jean Mitry after 1944. I described to them in considerable detail an apartment, a stairway, stuffed birds — the lair occupied by the gangster (Bancroft). I described this repeatedly for five or six years until Henri Langlois discovered a print of Underworld for the Cinémathèque Française. As soon as possible I had it projected at IDHEC. But the apartment in the film bore no relation to that in my memory — which I had, I suppose, recalled from The Drag Net, an exactly contemporary film of Sternberg's in which Bancroft also appeared.

   Even the film maker himself does not always have an exact recall of his own work. In 1941, the anti-fascist German writer, Friedrich Wolf, was a war correspondent for the Russians during the fighting near Moscow. He became separated from his unit during the terrible battle and ran into a Soviet patrol who took him for a Nazi parachutist spy because of this strong German accent. In order to identify himself he said he was the script writer of Professor Mmlock, a 1938 Soviet film which had had considerable success in the USSR. He was asked to recount the story for the many soldiers who had seen it, but they judged his summary so inaccurate that he might have been shot if other military personnel had not arrived who identified him. Since I was unable to discuss this dramatic episode with Friedrich Wolf, I can't say whether his own memory was at fault or whether it was the soldiers who had rememered the film inaccurately.

   In his book The Art of Film, Ernest Lindgren cites Pudovkin's 1928 analysis of a sequence from his own film Mother (1926) in which he described sequences which apparently didn't exist. Initially, I thought the British theoretician was right and agreed with him that the film maker, writing his text without re-seeing his film, had included scenes deleted at the editing stage or scenes in the shooting script which were never shot. Then, in Moscow, I saw the original Soviet version of Mother — very different from the English and French versions. I now think Lindgren was mistaken because he didn't know the original work but a distorted British adaptation in which sequences had been re-edited and several shots deleted.

Saying "I love you" is easy, a piece of piss, and more or less every man I know does it all the time. I've acted as though I haven't been able to say it a couple of times, although I'm not sure why. Maybe because I wanted to lend the moment that sort of corny Doris Day romance, make it more memorable than it otherwise would have been. You know, you're with someone, and you start to say something, and the you stop, and she goes "What?" and you go "Nothing," and she goes, "Please say it," and you go, "No, it'll sound stupid," and then she makes you spit it out, even though you'd been intending to say it all along, and she thinks it's all the more valuable for being hard-won. Maybe she knew all the time that you were messing about, but she doesn't mind, anyway. It's like a quote: it's the nearest any of us gets to being in the movies....

I like a filmmaker who walks you into a story. Some directors, rushing to get started, prefer to fly you in by helicopter--a popular choice for stories set in New York or Miami, where the camera can come skimming in over the water. Other filmmakers float you down on a crane, so you can survey the scene while a car pulls up to the suburban house, a train to the country station. Maybe you come into the picture by riding along with the characters (by rocket, if George Lucas is in charge); or maybe, if Spielberg is running things, the early shots reveal that you have no need to travel, because you were already inside the movie. You discover that your nose is somehow pressed against Liam Neeson's torso as he's getting dressed; or you realize that your eye is really the eye of Tom Hanks, who is watching how his hand shakes during the boat ride to Omaha Beach.

The primary purpose of the Academy Awards is not to honor the best work of the year, it is to publicize movies.

...in this town [Hollywood] there are two kinds of writers: established and emerging. If you're among the latter, you begin not with the written word, but with an idea.

I think there are two kinds of writers working in Hollywood. The first is the kind we hate to admit exist, but they do. He calculates the odds, analyzes the marketplace, and writes a paint-by-numbers script that, shock of shocks, gets bought and produced and he's got a career. As a hack. It's a job, like making rivets or putting bolts on car axles. The writing is probably solid, serviceable, but without passion, and it shows.

The second is someone who loves writing or loves the film business, wants to write from the soul. Probably does write from the soul. And somehow squeaks through that barely open door to a sale and a career. And then takes tons of meetings: "we adore your work, we want to be in business. We've got this idea, it's about two cops who go undercover as women, Lethal Weapon meets Tootsie. Lots of crude jokes, hijinks and action, you want to write it for us? Warner's loves the idea and Tom [Cruise or Hanks, it doesn't matter] is dying to wear a dress. Guaranteed greenlight, whaddayasay?" The right answer, obvious to those of us watching at home, is "NO!!! AAAAGHHH!" (insert rapidly running footsteps here.)

I went to a late movie after a while. It meant nothing. I hardly saw what went on. It was just noise and big faces.

A less obvious way in which the corporatization of movies blunts our responses is to train us to see films only in terms of those we've already seen -- to such a degree that we don't want them to be different from those we've seen before. More alarmingly, when they are different, we don't recognize the difference.

As a culture, we always prefer our movies to tell us exactly how characters should have behaved, so we can stand in judgment of social transgressors. We are ill at ease with movies that give us moral fumblers rather than outright villains, movies that remind us that a simple twist of fate would land us in those fumblers' shoes.

I raised questions in "JFK." The movie never said we had the answers. It deconstructed history, if you will. The Warren Commission is the myth, my movie was counter-mythology.

The worst thing about it is that the very idea of Jurassic Park, a place where eye-popping wonders are served up as a megabuck attraction, seems an obvious yet pointless metaphor for the commercialization of Steven Spielberg's empire. Since Hammond's [Hammond is the film's visionary entrepreneur/corporate mogul] toys and gizmos feature the same logo that's being used to sell the movie (and its many tie-in products), there's no way to separate Spielberg's 'satire' of marketing from the marketing itself.

Psychoanalysis and cinema were born in the same year.

Movies, like detective stories, make it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be suppressed in a humanitarian ordering of society.

But in all, I don't like to engage in telling stories. I don't like to arouse the viewer emotionally or give him advice. I don't like to belittle him or burden him with a sense of guilt. These are the things I don't like in the movies.

I think that a good film is one that has a lasting power and you start to reconstruct it right after you leave the theater. There are a lot of films that seem to be boring, but they are decent films. On the other hand, there are films that nail you to your seat and overwhelm you to the point that you forget everything, but you feel cheated later. These are the films that take you hostage. I absolutely don't like the films in which the filmmakers take their viewers hostage and provoke them. I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kinds of films I like.

It's like being in a stuffy room and opening a window. You let the air come in and then you breathe. In my mind, our dreams are windows in our lives and the significance of cinema is in its similarity to this window.

James Cole [Bruce Willis]: The movie never changes -- it can't change -- but everytime you see it, it seems to be different because you're different -- you notice different things.

[Sue Clayton, lecturer in screen writing and directing at London University] analyzed frame by frame what elements were present in different film genres and what made certain films successful... According to Clayton the blueprint for the perfect film is for it to have: 30 percent action, 17 percent comedy, 13 percent good versus evil, 12 percent sex/romance, 10 percent special effects, 10 percent plot and eight percent music.... As for the film that matched the recipe closest, that honor went to "Toy Story 2."

And there, in retrospect, might lie the secret of the first "Matrix": beyond the balletic violence, beyond the cool stunts, the idea that the world we live in isn't real is one that speaks right now to a general condition. For the curious thing about the movie was that everybody could grasp the basic setup instantly. Whether it occurs in cult science fiction or academic philosophy, we seem to be fascinated by the possibility that our world might not exist. We're not strangers to the feeling that, for much of our lives, we might just as well be brains-in-vats, floating in an amniotic fluid of simulations. It doesn't just strike us as plausibly weird. It strikes us as weirdly plausible.

It wasn't that I had anything against the movies, but they had never been very important to me, and not once in more than fifteen years of teaching and writing had I felt the urge to talk about them. I liked them in the way that everyone else did -- as diversions, as animated wallpaper, as fluff. No matter how beautiful or hypnotic the images sometimes were, they never satisfied me as powerfully as words did. Too much given, I felt, not enough was left to the viewer's imagination, and the paradox was that the closer movies came to simulating reality, the worse they failed at representing the world -- which is in us as much as it is around us. That was why I had always instinctively preferred black-and-white pictures to color pictures, silent films to talkies. Cinema was a visual language, a way of telling stories by projecting images onto a two-dimensional screen. The addition of sound and color had created the illusion of a third dimension, but at the same time it had robbed the images of their purity. They no longer had to do all the work, and instead of turning film into the perfect hybrid medium, the best of all possible worlds, sound and color had weakened the language they were supposed to enhance.

Senator [Steve Tom]: Mr. Dragon, you have a young daughter, do you not?
Peter Dragon [Jay Mohr]: Let's not go there...
Senator: Her name is Georgia, she's about 10 years old I believe.
Peter Dragon: Don't do this.
Senator: Has little Georgia seen your film entitled "Ripcord"?
Peter Dragon: She can't get in Senator, it's rated R.
Senator: Which contains 357 acts of violence, 175 profanities, and four scenes of lesbian sex. She proud of her daddy for that one?
Wendy Ward [Illeana Douglas]: I think we should just go.
Senator: How can you look that sweet little girl in the eye?
Peter Dragon: I manage. I never voted to subsidize the growing of tobacco, while turning my back on food programs for starving kids. I've never vetoed a gun control bill; all MY guns are fake, Senator. I've never rushed to the defense of Kuwaiti oil fields, while ignoring genocide in Africa, because big oil companies that line your fat pockets aren't concerned with black Africa. Those are all productions of YOUR company Senator, this company right here!
Senator: Now you are perilously close to being cited for comptempt, Mr. Dragon.
Peter Dragon: I'm already in contempt. I'm in contempt of all of you old whores and hypocrites. At least I'm giving the American people what they want.
Senator: And just exactly what is it that you think that they want?
Peter Dragon: I'll tell you exactly what they want, Senator. They want chase scenes and car crashes. They want firm breasts and tightass Latinto men. They want their cowboys to be strong and silent. They want their cops to bend the rules to get the job done. They want the boy to get the girl. They want the alien to be killed -- unless he's cute. They want the good guy to win. They want the bad guy to die -- hopefully in the biggest explosion the budget will allow. But most importantly, Senator, they want to walk into a theater and for ninty minutes forget the fucking mess that you have left of this nation.

I made a policy long ago to never do lists. They amount to soliciting unpaid labor from experts in order to lend legitimacy to a meaningless list used to support clip packages and to sell ads. Let me predict that few great silent, foreign or little-known films will be on your show, and that after the balloting, the winner will not be 'Citizen Kane,' 'Rules of the Game,' 'Metropolis' or anything by Buster Keaton."

How can you imagine I will make a scene of four minutes to say one idea? What I want from you is one scene of one minute and to put four ideas in it.

Pippin finds plenty of convincing things to say about the way in which the films encapsulate a certain version of American modernization, in which the frontier is always a promise and settling down a compromise.

...With reference to American democracy and the Western, it becomes a question of "how the bourgeois virtues, especially the domestic virtues, can be said to get a psychological grip in an environment where the heroic and martial virtues are so important," or, how do you get bloodthirsty gunslingers to act like responsible citizens, especially when being a gunslinger is so goddamn much fun?

It's a worthwhile question, especially given the current disjunction between the rationalist assumptions behind most present political philosophy and science and the crazy people actually running (and voting for) the government. John Wayne's face, the very image of self-anointed authority, is as likely a place as any for answers.

...Long ago, Leslie Fiedler pointed out that there's always something childish in great works of American literature, where running from civilization is a way of fleeing the dominion of women and dodging the burdens of responsibility, maturity, and marriage.

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience--they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie--for any movie--is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up. "There's one God for all creation, but there must be a separate God for the movies," a producer said. "How else can you explain their survival?" An atmosphere of hope develops before a big picture's release, and even after your friends tell you how bad it is, you can't quite believe it until you see for yourself. The lines (and the grosses) tell us only that people are going to the movies--not that they're having a good time. Financially, the industry is healthy, so among the people at the top there seems to be little recognition of what miserable shape movies are in. They think the grosses are proof that people are happy with what they're getting, just as TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for. (A number of the new movie executives come from TV.) These new executives don't necessarily see many movies themselves, and they rarely go to a theatre.

He rehearses his actors, but only in scenes that will never be in the movie.

In Hollywood, the phrase "science fiction film" doesn't usually mean what it should. Most films sold with that designation aren't true science fiction, because they don't deal in ideas in a sustained, conscientious way; they don't extrapolate where we are and where we might be headed, and what it might mean for the human race intellectually, physically and emotionally. More often what you get are action or horror or superhero movies with a faint science fiction flavor -- films that occasionally remind themselves to genuflect toward big themes when they aren't just having the characters run and jump and dodge explosions or be surprised by a monster lunging at them from the dark.

There are no entertaining moments in the film. In fact I am categorically against entertainment in cinema: it is as degrading for the author as it is for the audience.

Any film which tells a story is putting itself at the disposal of the ruling class.

Almost fifty years ago, Norman Mailer insisted that realistic fiction "had never caught up with the rate of change in American life, indeed it had fallen further and further behind." Even then, the answer to Mailer's complaint was obvious. Many writers and movie directors have turned to science fiction -- loving it for its brazenly free invention and its market popularity, but also, perhaps, as a way of catching up. By setting events in the future, they can identify social trends and technologies that bedazzle or frighten us, push them to their limits, and use the created fiction as a way of redirecting attention back to the present.

"Oldboy" is a good if trivial genre movie, no more, no less. There's no denying that Mr. Park is some kind of virtuoso, but so what? So was the last guy who directed a Gap commercial. Cinematic virtuosity for its own sake, particularly as expressed through cinematography - in loop-the-loop camera work and, increasingly, in computer-assisted ornamentation - is a modern plague that threatens to bury us in shiny, meaningless movies. Historically speaking, the most interesting thing about "Oldboy" is that like so much "product" now coming out of Hollywood, it is a B movie tricked out as an A movie. Once, a film like this, predicated on extreme violence and staying within the prison house of genre rather than transcending it, would have been shot on cardboard sets with two-bit talent. It would have had its premiere in Times Square.

The fact that "Oldboy" is embraced by some cinephiles is symptomatic of a bankrupt, reductive postmodernism: one that promotes a spurious aesthetic relativism (it's all good) and finds its crudest expression in the hermetically sealed world of fan boys. (At this point, it's perhaps worth pointing out that the head of the jury at Cannes last year was none other than Quentin Tarantino.) In this world, aesthetic and moral judgments - much less philosophical and political inquiries - are rejected in favor of a vague taxonomy of cool that principally involves ever more florid spectacles of violence. As in, "Wow, he's hammering those dudes with a knife stuck in his back - cool!" Or, "He's about to drop that guy and his dog from the roof - way cool!" Kiss-kiss, bang-bang, yawn-yawn. We are a long way from Pasolini and Peckinpah.

Gene Siskel famously said that his litmus test for giving a movie thumbs up or thumbs down was asking himself which would be more interesting: the film he'd just seen, or a documentary of its lead actors having lunch.

The people who describe all our work to us often don't know what they are talking about. They're wrong. There are people, literally, people who think that expressing an opinion is a creative act. The auteur stuff. I think they were these French guys with cigarette ashes all over them and that they basically misunderstood the whole thing.

The Professor [Michael Emil]: Knowledge isn't truth. It's just mindless agreement. You agree with me, I agree with someone else -- we all have knowledge. We haven't come any closer to the truth. You can never understand anything by agreeing, by making definitions. Only by turning over the possibilities. That's called thinking. If I say I know, I stop thinking. As long as I keep thinking, I come to understand. That way, I might approach some truth.

So many modern blockbusters err on the side of hand-holding, underlining their plots and character motivations with consistent expository dialogue or overly defined narration. There's this bizarre concern by Hollywood that audiences will rebel if they don't fully understand what's going on at every given moment, and so characters talk to themselves, motivations are spelled out in voiceover, and everyone, especially in action movies, speaks of what they have to do and why they have to do it.

Ninety-Eight percent of a film is whether you have the money or not. If he is saying 'I can get you the money,' that's the way you have to go. I mean, you end up with the most awful people in this business, which is why I have left. They are just horrible lying shits. About ninety-two percent of them are like that. So it is really an industry to avoid, people! Stay away! If you want to find horrible, mad, lying, insane people, join the film industry! But inside that world there are some very clever and gifted actors and writers and directors. But it is insane. It is literally insane.

Louise Banks [Amy Adams]: "In 1770, Captain James Cook's ship ran aground off the coast of Australia. He led a party into the country and they met the aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed at the animals that hop around and put their babies in their pouch and he asked what they were. The aborigines said 'kangaroo.' It wan't till later that they learned that 'kangaroo' means 'I don't understand.' It's not true, but it proves my point.'"

The series' repetitive structure is a feature, not a bug, as in the James Bond, "Star Wars" and Marvel franchises. If you don't like them, you can complain that they recycle the same images and situations. But if you like them, you can compare them to sonatas or sonnets or three-chord pop songs, where part of the fun lies in seeing what variations the artists can bring while satisfying a rigid structure.

"In a book", writes Mr Mars-Jones, "reader and writer collaborate to produce images, while a film director hands them down." I disagree. The greatest filmmakers, like the greatest novelists and poets, are trying to create a sense of communion with the viewer. They're not trying to seduce them or overtake them, but, I think, to engage with them on as intimate a level as possible. The viewer also "collaborates" with the filmmaker, or the painter. No two viewings of Raphael's "Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints" will be the same: every new viewing will be different. The same is true of readings of The Divine Comedy or Middlemarch, or viewings of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or 2001: A Space Odyssey. We return at different moments in our lives and we see things differently.

"The problem is not to make political films but to make films politically. "

At the cinema, we do not think, we are thought.

Even before Weekend opened in New York, Godard had recast himself as though he were a character in that movie, condemning his previous work to an auto-da-fe. Converted to the revolution by the events of May '68, he publicly repudiated his previous career -- not to mention the medium that nourished him.

Rimbaud abandoned poetry to run guns. So, too, Godard, although in his case it was as though he had abandoned poetry for the idea of running the idea of guns.

Fellini's great films are essentially musicals. Like most Italian directors of his generation, he didn't record live dialogue and sound. He depended on dubbing. On a set, he usually had an orchestra playing, and asked his actors to move, not in time with the music, but "in sympathy." Everyone in a Fellini film evokes an inner body rhythm.

I suspect it is rare for anyone to see what they consider to be the greatest film after the age of thirty. After forty it's extremely unlikely After fifty, impossible. The films you see as a child and in your early teens have such a special place in your affections that is's all but impossible to consider the objectively...

I saw it [Stalker] when it came out within a month of its release, when Tarkovsky was at his artistic peak. I saw it, so to speak, live. And this means that I saw it in a slightly different way from how a twenty-four-year-old might see it for the first time now....

The thing, the product, the work of art stays the same but by staying the same it ages -- and changes. It exists now in the wake of its own reputation...

Burn After Reading is a divisive film. The New Yorker's David Denby spoke for many when he complained that it suffered from "terminal misanthropy." Yet it is precisely because the film takes such a dim view of humanity that it seems eerily true to life. It's not just that the characters in the film are almost all amoral, but that they are so relentlessly stupid.

Remember, in the theatre everyone has eyes and can watch what they like. But in the cinema only the director has eyes, and they are the camera. What communicates through the camera is a different substance from that of the theatre.

[When the three assistant directors of Rashomon told Kurosawa that they did not understand the script, Kurosawa responded with this]:

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings—the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave--even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can't understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.

Every audience is tied to certain habits in the way that they look at film. If they don't have the same articulation of scene, they get lost. This makes me crazy.

Only sourpusses and unbending esthetes aren't thankful for screwball comedies. At their best these comedies have more actual invention in situation and character and more turbulence and energy than nine-tenths of the seriously intended, pretentious movies.... In screwballs, relentless common sense is imposed on a lunatic situation which has come out of and continues to operate in a realistic American atmosphere.

TOMAS [Pepe Hern]: And we have this.... It's everything we own, everything of value in the village.

[Out of a bandanna, Tomas lays on the bed everything of value from the village; inexpensive Jewelry, medallions, the Old Man's watch etc.]

CHRIS [Yul Brynner]: I've been offered a lot for my work, but never everything.

"When I saw the play in London, I was sort of amazed at how differently I remembered it. So I went back to the book to find out if the stage adaptation of the book was so different or if it was my memory. I found out the stage adaptation was very, very faithful to the book, and that it was my memory that was playing funny games. In my arrogance, I thought my memory was better."

There's more - the screenplay (worked on by four writers, including Karlson and Payne) is woven like a web, and the wonderful thing about noir is that the intricate fatalistic plotting isn't just clever entertainment but meaningful. The tighter the story's noose pulls, the more it expresses a philosophical, proletariat truth about American life in the mid-century - its broken dreams and capitalistic fears and wounded pride. The powerful mistrust that radiates from 99 River Street (and most noirs, and all of Karlson's) isn't just story-stuff, it's social commentary. It's an EKG of the class struggle, as the little men who fought WWII struggle in lousy jobs to pay the rent, while opportunists and thieves lurk in the backrooms twisting the system and getting rich. The lure of "making it big," either in show business or sports or crime or anything, is a lie that Payne's disgusted Everyman spits at in virtually every scene.

Legend has it that during the shooting of The Big Sleep (1946) no one could remember whether a certain character had committed suicide or had been killed (and if so, by whom); so they sent Chandler a telegram, and he couldn't remember, either. The story is absurd, yet plausible: there is a Ponzi-scheme side to film noir, where long-term logic is routinely sacrificed to immediate effect. And it works: one is never bored, with these films; it's only at the end, when the intrigue collapses like a castle of cards, that you feel a little disappointed -- a little betrayed. But after all, betrayal becomes the noir.

All my movies try to talk about life, my experience of life and how it is not like in a movie. Movies are made in a funnel-shape: the end has to make sense. My experience of life is the contrary. It's randomness -- a reverse funnel where things disappear. There are a lot of useless shots, but really good. A lot of following events without any cause or consequence.

It is in the unvaried repetition of familiar motifs that Barreto's originality lies.

Writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz famously said that the difference between movies and life is that movies have to make sense. The arc of a storyline with a beginning, middle and end, with actions and consequences, is itself a way of imposing order on chaos. Crime is a disruption of the order we attempt to impose through law, and we resolve that tension by finding out who, and, if we can, why.

My favorite kind of casting and my favorite kind of acting is where you don't feel them acting. That's why i'm so opposed to so much of the acting that's going on today. When you say 'oh, isn't that a great performance?', well I don't really want to see a performance. I want to see something happening that's real. Movie stars by their nature were not acting. They were being. I'm talking about movie stars like John Wayne or Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn. The movie stars of the golden age were not 'acting' in quotes. I mean they did occasionally. Bogart would act in The Caine Mutiny or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But what made him a star was when he was being Bogart.

So why did Hollywood continually screw up adaptations of [Elmore Leonard's] work? Maybe because Hollywood understands plot a lot better than it understands story.

Story is about things that happen, yes, but it's also about character and tone and mood. It's as much about the wandering as it is about the arrival. And all who wander, as the saying goes, are not lost. But studio executives don't like wandering. Wandering freaks them out. Wandering smells like film and studio executives hate film; they barely like movies. (They are huge fans of product, though. Huge.)

Salvador Mallo [Antonio Banderas]: Having seen the movie again, his acting is better now than 30 years ago.

Zulema [Cecilia Roth]: It's your eyes that changed, honey. It's the same movie.

[Home viewing of movies] has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn't. If further viewing is "suggested" by algorithms based on what you've already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema? ...Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.

I remember seeing the 1937 movie Stage Door in the mid-Forties. The audience tittered at the obsolete long skirts and curled hairdos. I saw the same movie in the mid-Seventies, and the audience sat enthralled as obsolescence was transformed by time into history

Movies set in the past or future cannot help being about where we are now.

I don't care about stories. I never did. Every story is the same. We have no new stories. We're just repeating the same ones.

I really don't think, when you do a movie that you have to think about the story. The film isn't the story. It's mostly picture, sound, a lot of emotions. The stories are just covering something.

With Damnation, for example, if you're a Hollywood studio professional, you could tell this story in 20 minutes. It's simple. Why did I take so long? Because I didn't want to show you the story. I wanted to show this man's life.

...every filmmaker has a different language, a different culture, a different background, a different history, a different budget. You cannot compare these things.

I don't believe in good actor, bad actor. If you're playing an interesting part in a worthwhile story and you're cast properly, you'd have to be a complete idiot to not be good.

Actors are threatened people. Before films came along to make them rich they often had need of a desperate gaiety.

What I want is to make people feel the passing of time. So I don't take two hours from their lives. They experience them.

If I could have made movies without any dialogue, it would have been paradise.

Dialogues for me belong to theater or television. I mean, I'm not someone who remembers movies because of their lines. I remember movies because of their images, because of the ideas that are being hidden or unfold through images. And that's the power of cinema. For me, it's not about dialogue.

And I hope one day I will be able to make a movie with as less dialogue as possible.

By the way, that's why silent movies were so powerful and still today the best movies. I mean, it's like normally a great movie, you should be able to watch it without sound. And that's the ultimate goal, yes.

Though far from perfect, the fact that the film constantly wears its earnest sentimentality on its sleeve registers as less of an irritating bug than an endearing feature in today's cultural discourse where an entire generation of viewers have become so inescapably irony-pilled that they don't seem capable anymore of emotionally responding to an ultra-sincere tear-jerker without an ounce of self-deflating cynicism.