Hour of the Wolf (1968, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

“Sometimes I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films…Most of all I miss working with (cinematographer) Sven Nykvist, perhaps because we are both utterly captivated by the problems of light: the gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, living, dead, clear, misty, hot, violent, bare, sudden, dark, springlike, falling, straight, slanting, sensual, subdued, limited, poisonous, calming, pale light. Light.”

-Ingmar Bergman, in his autobiography The Magic Lantern (1989)

Katharine Hepburn & Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story (1940, dir. George Cukor) (via drmacro)

“I loved working with Katharine. She was fun…but she was very serious about the film. She was almost the producer, and when I had to do a scene in a bathing suit…well, I just told Katharine that I looked ridiculous in a bathing suit because my legs were just so thin. She said, ‘Show me your legs,’ and she said it with such authority that I hoisted my pants up until she could see my knees. And she took one look and said, ‘You’re right. Those are just the worst legs I’ve ever seen!’ And so she talked [The Philadelphia Story director George] Cukor into letting me do the scene in a bathrobe”.

-Stewart on Hepburn, his gams, and filming The Philadelphia Story (quoted in Michael Munn’s Jimmy Stewart)

via The Seventh Seal (1957, dir. Ingmar Bergman)

“The final scene when Death dances off with the travelers was, as I said, shot at Hovs Hallar. We had packed up for the day because of an approaching storm. Suddenly, I caught sight of a strange cloud. [Cinematographer] Gunnar Fischer hastily set the camera back into place. Several of the actors had already returned to where we were staying, so a few grips and a couple of tourists danced in their place, having no idea what it was all about. The image that later became famous of the Dance of Death beneath the dark cloud was improvised in only a few minutes.

That’s how things can happen on the set. We made the film in thirty-five days.” 

–Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Films

“I am not funny. My writers were funny. My directors were funny. The situations were funny…What I am is brave. I have never been scared. Not when I did movies, certainly not when I was a model, and not when I did I Love Lucy.”

-Lucille Ball (Rolling Stone, June 23, 1983) (photo by Walt Sanders for LIFE, 1943, click to enlarge)

Lucille Ball, John Wayne, and Vivian Vance behind the scenes of Wayne’s guest-starring turn on I Love Lucy (1955)

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

“I realized that the sets had to deviate completely in form and design from the usual naturalistic style. The images had to be like visionary nightmares - averted from reality, they had to acquire fantastic graphic form. No real structural elements could be recognizable…[Caligari co-set designer Walter] Reimann, who applied the Expressionist painting technique in his designs, succeeded with his idea that this subject had to have Expressionist sets, costumes, actors, and direction…

Furthermore, I would like to say that sets should remain as background in front of which the action takes place, reflecting it and supporting the actor, who is after all supposed to have the major supporting role. In Caligari, this relationship is reversed. In this single special case I will concede that the sets became the major means of expression.”

-Caligari co-set designer, Hermann Warm, Caligari & Caligarismus

Production sketch by set designer/architect Walter Reimann for The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920, dir. Robert Wiene) (via)

Psychology Today: Do you have any formal interest in psychology?

Werner Herzog: I loathe psychology as one of the major faults of our civilization nowadays. There’s something not right about this amount of introspection. I can only give you a metaphor: When you move into an apartment, you cannot start to illuminate every last corner with neon light. If there are no dark corners or hidden niches, your house becomes uninhabitable. Human beings who are trying to self-reflect and explore their innermost being to the last corner become uninhabitable people.

PT: Let’s not forget that psychology isn’t just about introspection; it can shed light on other people.

Herzog: No, you can understand others by other means. By dint of compassion, you understand other people, and there is a concordance of hearts. That is something different. Move away from psychology and engage in concordance of hearts.

(via, photo by Beat Presser)

Land of Silence and Darkness (1971, dir. Werner Herzog)

Q. Whenever I have presented this film to audiences, it has always made a tremendous impact. Why do you think the film strikes such a chord?

Werner Herzog: People generally respond so positively to it because it is a film about solitude, about the terrifying difficulties of being understood by others, something we have to deal with every single day of our lives. In the film one finds the most radical and absolute human dignity, human suffering stripped bare.

Land of Silence & Darkness is a film particularly close to my heart. If I had not made it there would be a great gap in my existence. Fini Straubinger, a 56-year-old deaf and blind woman, caused me to think about loneliness to an extent that I never had before.

In her case, loneliness is taken to unimaginable limits, and I have the distinct impression that anyone seeing the film asks, ‘Good God, what would be left of my life if I were blind and deaf? How could I live, overcome loneliness make myself understood?’ And the question of how we learn concepts, learn languages, learn communication is also there.

Q. Why did you want to include the children who had been born deaf and blind?

Herzog: I thought it was important to show a different side to the story. Fini went deaf and blind when she was a teen, which clearly makes a difference in the kind of contact she had with the outside world. We will never know what these other kids think about the world about them, for there is just no way to communicate with them, and contact rarely surpasses the very basic palpable essentials: ‘This is a book. This is heat. Do you need food?’

[Helen Keller], who was born deaf and blind and actually studied philosophy raises many questions about what these children think and feel about abstract concepts, to say nothing of innate human emotions.

It seems certain they do feel and understand emotions like anger and fear just like anyone else, but it is not possible for us to know how these children cope with the anonymous fears that are within and that can never be explained by the outside world. The children we filmed would have moments of deep fear that seemed to relate only to what was happening inside their own heads, which when you think about it is quite startling.

-2002, excerpted from Herzog on Herzog. In the above still, Fini Straubinger demonstrates how she communicates using a tactile language tapped out on the hand.

“I am vain, and afraid that I’ll leave nothing of myself behind when I die, nothing to be remembered by…An actress is dead when the last person to remember her dies! And that’s not enough for me!””

-Alla Nazimova (quote/photo via, 1923)

“I am writing a play about a woman dancing with her bare feet in the blood of a man she has craved for and slain.”

-Oscar Wilde (1891)

Alla Nazimova in Salome (1923, dir. Charles Bryant), the screen adaptation of Wilde’s play. Above, she performs the “Dance of the Seven Veils” to seduce King Herod into ordering the beheading of John the Baptist; below, the execution.

Q. I was wondering what else, besides soccer and your career, might interest a character like you - such as, I don’t know, politics for example.

Sean Connery: I’ve never voted since I was born. What’s the point? Things go on just the same, and politics is all a question of money: the more money you have, the more successful you are in politics. I’m not a monarchist, but I’m not a republican…I’m not a reactionary, and I’m not a socialist, either, although I see the world from an essentially economic point of view.

It’s all a question of money, my dear, money! I feel sympathy for the workers of course; I was one of them. But I’ve never deluded myself that they’re Jesus Christs. God! I’ve lived too long among them not to know they’re not Jesus Christs. Ideologies leave me cold. I’ve never liked people who talk, I like people who get on with things and do them well and do them thoroughly, without speeches. I’m a practical man.

Do you see what I mean? I admire something done, accomplished and successfully finished, not something theorized and philosophized about. Nothing appeals to me more than strength, energy, enthusiasm. Between the conquered and conquerors, I choose the conquerors, always.

-1965, Look magazine (reprinted in The Limelighters)(photo by Leo Fuchs, 1963)