Rashomon (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa)

“[The three assistant directors on Rashomon] found the script baffling and wanted me to explain it to them. ‘Please read it again more carefully,’ I told them. ‘If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.’ But they wouldn’t leave. ‘We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t understand it at all; that’s why we want you to explain it to us.’ For their persistence I gave them this simple explanation:

‘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.’”

-Akira Kurosawa, excerpted from Something Like an Autobiography

“There is a sort of demon that every now and then makes you want to destroy things, just like that. Sometimes I feel like letting myself go, like getting myself into trouble. Everyone’s got a little spider knitting its web inside. Sometimes it wakes up and sometimes it doesn’t. When it does, you want to break things.”

-Catherine Deneuve (photo by Sam Levin)

Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour (1967, dir. Luis Buñuel)

“Sex without religion is like cooking an egg without salt. Sin gives more chances to desire.”

-Luis Buñuel

In homage: Florence Georgie in It Happened On 23rd Street, above (1901, dir. Edwin Porter); Marilyn Monroe in publicity still for Seven Year Itch, below (1955, dir. Billy Wilder)

“I am in no sense of the word a great artist, not even a great animator; I have always had men working for me whose skills were greater than my own. I am an idea man. I can never stand still. I must explore and experiment. I am never satisfied with my work. I resent the limitations of my own imagination.”

-Walt Disney (via)

via Dumbo (1941, dir. Ben Sharpsteen)

“[Walt Disney] has accomplished something that has defied all the efforts and experiments of the laboratories in zoology and biology. He has given animals souls.”

-William Lyon Phelps

Claudia Cardinale in 8 1/2 (1963, dir. Federico Fellini)

Some summer Friday afternoon thoughts:

“I don’t understand people who like to work and talk about it like it was some sort of goddamn duty. Doing nothing feels like floating on warm water to me. Delightful, perfect.”

-Ava Gardner 

Jeannie Epper, Wonder Woman stunt double, with her Wonder Woman acting double Lynda Carter (1976)

“There’s not any one thing I can say about why I love it. It’s not for the paycheck. It empowers me. It gives me a sense of great accomplishment and control. As a woman, when you pull off something that only men do, it raises respect for all women.”

-Jeannie Epper

It’s no exaggeration to say that for nearly as long as there have been movies where cowboys fall off horses, or cars get flipped, or bad guys get set on fire, there have been Eppers. By the family’s best reckoning there have been 15 Eppers who have risked their necks in the film industry since the 1930s. A couple dozen more if you count in-laws and cousins. Like Daleys in Chicago politics, or Mannings in pro football, the stunt business is a dynastic one. They’re simply born into it.

The Eppers may not be the most famous stuntpeople in Hollywood, or the flashiest, but their roots undoubtedly go the deepest. If you watch an old Western with Gary Cooper doing a fancy dismount from a horse, you’re watching an Epper. When you see Janet Leigh being stabbed in the shower in Psycho, the killer’s hand is an Epper’s. Kathleen Turner being swept down a mudslide in Romancing the Stone? An Epper. That bus ripped apart in the Transformers movie? Take a wild guess who was behind the wheel. This paragraph could go on all day.

Jeannie Epper did her first professional stunt at 9 (1950): She rode a horse bareback down a cliff. Now, 57 years later, she’s considered by many to be the greatest stuntwoman who’s ever lived. Earlier this year, she was the first woman to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars of the stunt world, the Taurus World Stunt Awards. Right before they began the tribute, a procession of nearly a hundred stuntwomen walked on stage. All of them owed their careers to Jeannie.

-via Danger is Their Middle Name

Fritz Lang & the monocle he sported during the filming of Metropolis (1927) (via)

On the increased use of violence in post-war films:

“After the war, there was no longer a sense of family. We no longer loved our flag or honored our country. People no longer believe in hell and brimstone, or even retribution and therefore they do not believe in punishment after they are dead. What could we be afraid of? There was only one thing: physical pain. Physical pain comes from violence and I think today that is the only fact that people really fear. And when we are afraid of violence, then it becomes an element of drama. So, brutality’s now a necessary ingredient of dramatic development and denouement.

We can’t avoid violence because it is everywhere. It should be present in films. But everything depends on the way it is shown. I detest violence when it is shown as a spectacle or when it is used to make us laugh. And that is how it is used more and more on the screen.”

-Lang, in 1967 interview (via Brunnhuber’s Fritz Lang: His Life & Work)

Brigitte Helm in Metropolis (1927, dir. Fritz Lang)

On the creation of Robot Maria:

“The concentric rings of light that surround her and move from top to bottom were in fact a little ball of silver rapidly swung in a circle and filmed on a background of black velvet. We superimposed those shots, in the lab, over the shot of the robot in a sitting position that we had filmed previously.”

-Fritz Lang