The Haunting (1963, dir. Robert Wise, based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House)

“An evil old house - the kind some people call ‘haunted’ - is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored. Hill House had stood for 90 years and might stand for 90 more. Silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House and whatever walked there…walked alone.”

(via)

Michael Caine in The Ipcress File (1965, dir. Sidney J. Furie) (via)

The dark side of fame:

“A long time ago I interviewed Michael Caine. He came to America to make a movie called Hurry Sundown, after having become a success in Alfie and The Ipcress File. And I said, ‘What does it feel like to be a movie star? And he said, ‘You can’t go into a dirty bookstore anymore.’

He said, ‘I tried it. In England we don’t have the kind of pornography you have over here, but I’d heard about the stores in Times Square. And so I looked in through the window of one of them; I was curious. With my trained actor’s eye, I quickly realized that there was no eye contact in a porno store. Everybody looks as tunnel vision, nobody looks at anybody else, and I realized this is a way… An actor would notice this. And I congratulated myself, I said Michael, you can walk right in there because nobody will look at you, so I walked right in.

‘Unfortunately, there was a gent on an elevated stool with a microphone whose job it was to say, ‘Okay gents, this isn’t the library, make your purchases.’ And he got on his microphone and said, ‘Look who we have in the rubber wear section - Michael Caine!’”

-Roger Ebert, Fresh Air, orig. airdate March 21, 1996

The Mirror (1975, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)

“With an amazing regularity I keep seeing one and the same dream. It seems to make me return to the place, poignantly dear to my heart, where my grandfather’s house used to be, in which I was born 40 years ago right on the dinner table. I see this dream again and again. Each time I try to enter it, something prevents me from doing that. And when I see those walls made of logs and the dark entrance, even in my dream I become aware that I’m only dreaming it. And the overwhelming joy is clouded by anticipation of awakening.

At times something happens and I stop dreaming of the house and the pine trees of my childhood around it. Then I get depressed. And I can’t wait to see this dream in which I’ll be a child again and feel happy again because everything will still be ahead, everything will be possible…”

Conrad Veidt, 1929. Photo by Edward Steichen.

“I had been longing to get my hands on Conrad Veidt ever since he came to England. He was such an overpowering personality that directors were afraid of him. He was tall, over six foot two inches, lean and bony. He had magnetic blue eyes, black hair and eyebrows, beautiful, strong hands, and a mouth with sardonic, not to say satanic, lines to it. He used an eye-glass. He was the show-off of all time. In private life, as I was to discover, he was the sweetest and most easy of human beings.

…Conrad Veidt was seated alone at a table by the window drinking coffee when Emeric [Pressburger] and I arrived at the studio restaurant. Emeric and I exchanged a glance. This magnificent animal was reserved for us. I went over and stood at his table. He looked up and I got the full impact of those deep blue eyes under black brows.

I said: ‘Mr Veidt, my name is Michael Powell. Alexander Korda has told me that we are to work together on ‘The Spy in Black’.’

He said: ‘Ye-e-e-s.’ Pumas purr like that.”

-Michael Powell on meeting Veidt (excerpted from Powell’s A Life in Movies: An Autobiography)

Conrad Veidt & Lil Dagover in The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920, dir. Robert Wiene) (via) (online here)

Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Misfits (1961, dir. John Huston)

“She’s American and it’s very clear that she is. She’s very good that way - one has to be very local to be universal.”

-Henri Cartier-Bresson on Marilyn Monroe, quoted in James Goode’s The Making of the Misfits

Dracula’s Brides in production still from Dracula (1931, Tod Browning) Art direction by Charles D. Hall

Jimmy Stewart with his two stepsons (California 1951, photo by Gene Lester) 

“I’m beginning to believe that, in films, what everyone is striving for is to produce moments—not a performance, not a characterization, not something where you get into the part—you produce moments that create a feeling of believability to what you’re doing….

I was making a Western in British Columbia and we were on the Columbia Icefields. It was raining and there was heavy mist around, so we couldn’t shoot, so we were all huddled around a fire. Suddenly, out of the mist, came a man, and he was not a young man. He had a beard—it wasn’t exactly a beard, he just hadn’t shaved for a while—and he was a miner type, he was dressed like a miner. He came closer to us and he said, ‘Which one of you is Stewart?’

‘I am.’

He came over and looked at me and said, ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah. I recognize ya. Well, I heard you was here, and I thought I’d come up and say hello. I’ve seen a lot of your picture shows, but I think the one I liked best—you were in this room and your girlfriend was in the next room and there were fireflies outside, and you recited a piece of poetry to her. I thought that was a nice thing for you to do.’

And I remembered exactly the moment, exactly the film, who was in it, who directed it, and I also realized that that picture had been released twenty years before. That man made a tremendous impression on me. To think that I had been part of creating a moment that this man had liked and had remembered for twenty years. I’ll never forget it. That’s what I mean by the moment.”

-Stewart, in a 1972 British Film Institute interview (via)

Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, dir. Sergio Leone)