Zitate

[about CinemaScope] It's only good for funerals and snakes.

Each picture has some sort of rhythm which only the director can give it. He has to be like the captain of a ship.

There was a time when all I looked for was a good story, but nowadays everything has to look like the size of Mount Rushmore, and the actors in close-up look as though they belong there.

I do not like producers.

[on Erich von Stroheim] In my opinion, there were only two directors in Hollywood who made films without regard to box-office success: Von Stroheim and myself.

[on Edward G. Robinson] Each part he plays, he enriches with deep and warm understanding of human frailties and compels us to pity rather than condemnation, always adding vivid color to the intricate mosaic of motion picture reality.

In America sex is preached, in France it is done.

[asked in a 1975 interview if he ever met Raoul Walsh] I never traveled around meeting other directors. I wasn't haughty in this respect. It is just that all my life I have been so involved in my work that I guess one could say in general that, whenever I had to balance my private life and my profession, my profession always won out.

To begin with I should say that I am a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or only rarely, with my ear--to my constant regret.

My private life has nothing to do with my films.

I think any decent human being should run away from home.

[on Marlene Dietrich] She wears three layers of make-up. One for the stage, one for the street, and one to go to bed with.