“The industrial direction is sometimes too much. We should think more about fantasy.”
LUXURY
“I love luxury. And luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity. Vulgarity is the ugliest word in our language. I stay in the game to fight it.”
Coco Chanel
SOME KIND OF MAJESTY
Some kind of nature,
Some kind of soul.
Sound kind of mixture,
Some kind of gold.
Some kind of majesty
Some chemical load.
BOWFINGER'S BIG THING
Dave: But movies cost millions of dollars to make.
Robert K. Bowfinger: That's after gross net deduction profit percentage deferment ten percent of the nut. Cash, every movie cost $2,184.
JANNIS TSIPOULANIS
"There must be a certain look of availability in the women I photograph. I think the woman who gives the appearance of being available is sexually much more exciting than a woman who's completely distant. This sense of availability I find erotic.”
― Helmut Newton, White Women
ART LINSON
"Power is an elusive term, but in Hollywood it's everything, I don't care what they say, you either have it, want it, or you're afraid of losing it."
THE ETERNAL EXECUTIVE
”You’re very unhappy for a long period of time. And you don’t experience joy. At the end you experience relief, if you’re lucky.” -John Calley, accepting the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences near the end of his life.
THE MACHINE
"The thing what you learn in directing is that no matter how complex the shooting, you have to remain sensitive to the people around you or the machine will ultimately take over. If you don't keep in mind the essential humanity of it all, technique will dominate." - Irvin Kerschner
SHOWBUSINESS TODAY
"This business is scrounging around for what to do. The medium is busy displaying the fat lady at 375 pounds (who) in two months is gonna be 240. Who gives a shit? The industry has destroyed themselves. It's no longer relevant because it now puts all of its product on a stupid phone. You're going to put 'Lawrence of Arabia' on that goddamned stupid sonofabitch?"
-Jerry Lewis
OIL!
“If [our] effort to develop shale oil is successful, as I believe it will be, then the news we’ll report in the coming decades will reflect a more prosperous, more democratic and more secure world.”
-Rupert Murdoch, on discovering oil in Israel
WELLES ON ANTONIONI
"I don't like to dwell on things. It's one of the reasons I'm so bored with Antonioni - the belief that, because a shot is good, it's going to get better if you keep looking at it. He gives you a full shot of somebody walking down a road. And you think, 'Well, he's not going to carry that woman all the way up that road.' But he does. And then she leaves and you go on looking at the road after she's gone!"
GASPAR NOE
"If you write a script or write novels then OK- you're an auteur, but when you're directing movies you feel more like a politician or the captain of a football team. At the end of the day you need ten or eleven good people behind you if you're gonna win the game."
THE ENTREPRENEURIAL FILM
"Apathy and Cynicism are not the parents of great art, great movies or great entrepreneurs. The day our passion and enthusiasm subsides will be the day of our undoing. We need to stay plugged in and turned on. I have realized the need to be involved with great movies is one part of it, but the even greater need is to be surrounded by inspiring entrepreneurs."
Graham Taylor
CULTURE + DIVISION
"...if there is anything worthwhile doing for the sake of culture, then it is touching on subject matters and situations which link people, and not those that divide people. There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all" -kubrick
AMERICAN COMEDY
"The American comedies of the 1950s are some of the most impeccably-constructed films ever made; the American comedies of the late 1990s through the mid-to-late 2000s are some of the ugliest, sloppiest and most bloated. It used to be that if you wanted to learn about pacing and construction in cinema, you looked at American screen comedy. Nowadays, it's where you look if you want to learn about lopsidedness and missed opportunities."
-"In the Margin: All Solos", Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
DIRECTOR PRODUCER
Since I've produced some 40 of my own films, I know the value of money. For Bad Lieutenant, I demanded access to the budget on a daily basis. And each night after shooting I checked our cash flow, where we overspent, where we were precarious, where we had some cushion. In 60 films, I've never delivered one picture over budget. Five came in under budget and Bad Lieutenant was $2.6 million under. I do not shoot all sorts of angles and reversals and coverage. I shoot only what I need for the screen. - herzog
BALENCIAGA
"Cristobal Balenciaga is the couturier of couturiers. He is the master of us all."
-Christian Dior
THE LAST TYCOON
“There is no shortage of talent in Hollywood. There is only a shortage of talent that can recognize talent.” — Jerry Wald
BRATZ VS MATTEL
"It's the principle. I'm going to show that big, multi-national corporations can't bully or streamroll self-made entrepreneurs and get away with it."
-Isaac Larian, MGA Entertainment
AMADOU & MARIAM
"Inside of us is the source our happiness. When it’s chaotic and noisy, then the world can be troublesome. That’s why we meditate. …That’s what we’re working on."
Russel Simmons, at the Ideal Academy
"“We wish Muslims to be free and happy in Canada but we insist they are reasonable. Driving in a burka is not reasonable to us. It is dangerous. Asking for a thumbprint instead of a photograph on a driver's license or passport is not considered reasonable here."
-Congressional hearing on the radicalization of Muslim Americans
-Congressional hearing on the radicalization of Muslim Americans
JOHN HUSTON
Everything must serve the idea- I must say this again and again. The means used to convey the idea should be the simplest and most direct and clear. I don't believe in overdressing anything. Just what is required. No extra words, no extra images, no extra music. But it seems to me that this is a universal principal of art. To say as much as possible with a minimum of means. And to be always clear about what you are trying to say. That means, of course, that you must know what you are trying to say. So I guess my first principle is to understand myself, and then to find the simplest way to make others understand it, too.
EGYPT
"We can fulfill the people's demands in a civilized way. We will not receive instruction from anyone. No one makes this decision for us."
"You have gained your liberty. You have gained your right to catch up with the rest of the world. Make the best of it."
-Hosni Mubarak, departing words
BLACK MARTINI
"Kids today don't appreciate quality pictures. I wanna give 'em Ben-Hur! Cecil DeMille! All they wanna see these days is Monroe's tits and that faggot James Dean" -Hollywood Producer Michael H. Zweig
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