Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion (1965, dir. Roman Polanski) (via)

“My aim was to show Carole’s hallucinations through the eye of the camera, augmenting their impact by using wide-angle lenses of progressively increasing scope. But in itself, that wasn’t sufficient for my purpose. I also wanted to alter the actual dimensions of the apartment — to expand the rooms and passages and push back the walls so that audiences could experience the full effect of Carole’s distorted vision.  

Accordingly we designed the walls of the set so they could be moved outward and elongated by the insertion of extra panels. When ‘stretched’ in this way, for example, the narrow passage leading to the bathroom assumed nightmarish proportions.”

-Polanski, quoted in Roman (1984)

“This sickness, to express oneself. What is it?”

-Jean Cocteau (The Paris Review, 1964)

Photo by Philippe Halsman (via)

Akira Kurosawa on the set of Yojimbo (1961) (via)

Stanley Kubrick, James Mason, and Peter Sellers on the set of Lolita (1962, dir. Stanley Kubrick) (via)

Orson Welles performing the “Broomstick Suspension” magic trick with Lucille Ball during the filming of the I Love Lucy episode, “Lucy Meets Orson Welles” (1956) 

“I’ve never had a friend in my life who wanted to see a magic trick, you know. I don’t know anybody who wants to see a magic trick. So I do it professionally; it’s the only way I get to perform.

I went once to a birthday party for [MGM boss] Louis B. Mayer with a rabbit in my pocket which I was going to take out of his hat. On came Judy Garland and Danny Kaye and Danny Thomas and everybody you ever heard of and then Al Jolson sang for two hours and my rabbit was peeing all over me, you know. And the dawn was starting to rise over the Hillcrest Country Club as we said goodnight to Louis B. Mayer and nobody’d asked me to do a magic trick. So the rabbit and I went home.”

-Welles, in the 1982 documentary The Orson Welles Story

Interviewer: Her performance of the blind girl in Jeanne Ney is one of her most striking. I don’t feel Brigitte Helm is acting. I feel she is in a trance. That she has the power to throw herself into a trance and to move and speak and live a life quite outside her own experience.

G.W. Pabst: Ah, you see. You have it. Do you know the scene when she walks with Jeanne Ney in the streets of Paris, she was almost killed. The actor driving the taxi was not a driver really, but had had to learn. He was not very sure of his steering.

Brigitte Helm walked right in front of him. I had to run before the camera to save her. Do you know why? She was blind. She simply did not see it.

-excerpted from Close Up magazine interview (March 1929) 

“I just want [people] to remember me a hundred years from now. I don’t care that they’re not able to quote any single line that I’ve written. But just that they can say, ‘Oh, he was a writer.’ That’s sufficiently an honored position for me.”

-Rod Serling (1975, via)

(Syfy’s July 4th Twilight Zone marathon schedule here)

Jean Marais in Beauty and the Beast (1946, dir. Jean Cocteau) (via)

“My method is simple: not to aim at poetry. That must come of its own accord. The mere whispered mention of its name frightens it away. I shall try to build a table. It will be up to you then to eat at it, to examine it or to chop it up for firewood.”

-Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film (1947)

Akira Kurosawa conferring with Francis Ford Coppola for a commercial they filmed for Suntory Whiskey during the shoot of Kagemusha. The commercial can be seen here. 

(via)

1920’s-era Paris Stock Exchange in L’Argent (1928, dir. Marcel L’Herbier) (via)

“After a decade of filmmaking, I became obsessed by a single idea: to film at any cost, even (what a paradox!) at great cost, a fierce denunciation of money.”

-Marcel L’Herbier on L’argent, excerpted from his memoir The Head that Turns

Orson Welles directs Anthony Perkins on the set of The Trial (1962) Photo by Nicolas Tikhomiroff (via)

Q. A critic who admires your work very much said that, in The Trial, you were repeating yourself…

Welles: Exactly, I repeated myself. I believe we do it all the time. We always take up certain elements again. How can it be avoided? An actor’s voice always has the same timbre and, consequently, he repeats himself. It is the same for a singer, a painter…There are always certain things that come back, for they are part of one’s personality, of one’s style. If these things didn’t come into play, a personality would be so complex that it would become impossible to identify it.

It is not my intention to repeat myself, but in my work there should certainly be references to what I have done in the past. Say what you will, but The Trial is the best film I ever made…I have never been so happy as when I made this film.”

-excerpted from Orson Welles: Interviews

Stanley Kubrick, Chris Chase, & Jamie Smith on the set of Killer’s Kiss (1955)

“Stanley was very sweet and kind to me…He’d always drive me home. [On one] ride home I said, ‘Why are you always so nice to everyone?’ He said, ‘Honey, nobody’s going to get anything out of this movie but me.”

-Chase, 2001

(via)

Georges Méliès (far right, standing) with his wife, Eugénie Genin (seated, with hat), and other relatives, circa 1890 (via)