A Film Needs More Than You Can

From The Very Beginning, All Of My Films Have Divided The Critics. Some Have Thought Them Wonderful, And Others Have Found Very Little Good To Say. But Subsequent Critical Opinion Has Always Resulted In A Very Remarkable Shift To The Favorable. In One Instance, The Same Critic Who Originally Rapped The Film Has Several Years Later Put It On An All-time Best List. But Of Course, The Lasting And Ultimately Most Important Reputation Of A Film Is Not Based On Reviews, But On What, If Anything, People Say About It Over The Years, And On How Much Affection For It They Have.

If You Really Want To Communicate Something, Even If It’s Just An Emotion Or An Attitude, Let Alone An Idea, The Least Effective And Least Enjoyable Way Is Directly. It Only Goes In About An Inch. But If You Can Get People To The Point Where They Have To Think A Moment What It Is You’re Getting At, And Then Discover It, The Thrill Of Discovery Goes Right Through The Heart.

Critical Opinion On My Films Has Always Been Salvaged By What I Would Call Subsequent Critical Opinion.

New York Was The Only Really Hostile City. Perhaps There Is A Certain Element Of The Lumpen Literati That Is So Dogmatically Atheist And Materialist And Earth-bound That It Finds The Grandeur Of Space And The Myriad Mysteries Of Cosmic Intelligence Anathema.

The First Really Important Book I Read About Filmmaking Was The Film Technique By Pudovkin. This Was Some Time Before I Had Ever Touched A Movie Camera And It Opened My Eyes To Cutting And Montage.