“I don’t know that I’ve any style at all. I just patterned myself on a combination of Jack Buchanan [musical comedy star of the 1920s], Noël Coward, and Rex Harrison. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point. It’s a relationship.”

-Cary Grant (photo by Imogen Cunningham, 1932)

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)

“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring. There is no greater experience in a studio than to witness the expression of a sensitive face under the mysterious power of inspiration. To see it animated from inside, and turning into poetry.”

-Carl Theodor Dreyer, Thoughts on My Craft

(Anna Karina in 1962’s Vivre Sa Vie watches Renee Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc)

On the birth of Vampira:

“I eventually became Vampira because Vampira is a kind of entity, what we call a woman, even though she’s androgynous, who survives in this carnal world. I, Maila Nurmi, am not. Early in my growing years, being poor, skinny, scrawny, wearing secondhand clothes, having very low self-esteem, I needed to have something to cling to so I created an imaginary image. One who was imperious, invulnerable, extremely beautiful - I was extremely ugly, you know. And she was curvaceous, where I was anorexic. She was everything wonderful.

She started to form in my fantasies when I was a shy, friendless little child. And then I saw outward images of her as I grew older. The Dragon Lady in Terry & the Pirates…the Evil Queen in Snow White…Theda Bara from the silents. [Vampira] was that - it’s an anima that’s existed since the beginning of time. She’s just another form of it.

But nothing had really formulated for me until I saw Sunset Boulevard and that Norma Desmond character rammed itself deep into my subconscious. I believe artists borrow from all sources and they should. But I think I borrowed way too much from Norma Desmond because a year & a half after I saw her on the screen, Vampira erupted. ‘They had faces in my day’ - and Vampira was a face.”

-via Chiller Theatre interview, 1994

Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)

“My father took me to see this film in 1950, when I was eight years old. And I’ve never forgotten it. I wouldn’t know how to begin to explain what this film has meant to me over the years. It’s about the joy and exuberance of film-making itself. It’s one of the true miracles of film history.

What keeps nourishing me over the years is the spell the film casts, how it weaves the mystery of the obsession of creativity, of the creative drive. It all comes down to that wonderful exchange early in the film when Anton Walbrook confronts Moira Shearer at a cocktail party. ‘Why do you want to dance?’ he asks, and she answers, ‘Why do you want to live?’ The look on his face is extraordinary.’

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about that exchange. It expresses so much about the burning need for art – the mystery of the passion to create. It’s not that you want to do it, it’s that you have to do it. You have no choice. You have to live it and it comes with a price. But what a time paying it.”

-Martin Scorsese (2009)

Behind the scenes of The Blackguard (1925, dir. Graham Cutts) Art direction by Alfred Hitchcock

When Hitchcock arrived on the set of The Blackguard, the great German director F.W. Murnau was filming The Last Laugh nearby on the UFA lot.

Hitchcock either engaged Murnau in conversation, or overheard him tell others: “What you see on the set does not matter. All that matters is what you see on the screen.”

Hitchcock never missed an opportunity to quote this remark, which became a cornerstone of his own approach: The reality didn’t matter if the illusion was effective. He then emulated Murnau by hiring a slew of dwarves to stand far from the camera in The Blackguard, creating an artificial perspective for a crowd scene.

-excerpted from Patrick McGilligan’s Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light

Jean-Louis Trintignant in The Conformist (1970, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci)

“Godard was my real guru, you understand? I used to think there was cinema before Godard and cinema after - like before and after Christ. So what he thought about the film meant a great deal to me.

[At the screening], he doesn’t say anything to me. He just gives me a note and then he leaves. I take the note and there was a Chairman Mao portrait on it and with Jean-Luc’s writing. The note says: ‘You have to fight against individualism and capitalism.’ That was his reaction to my movie. I was so enraged that I crumpled it up and threw it under my feet.

…Why do you think Godard didn’t like The Conformist, I ask Bertolucci. It was, after all, partly a trenchant diagnosis of a fascistic mentality. “I had finished the period in which to be able to communicate would be considered a mortal sin. He had not.”

But there might be another reason Godard didn’t like the film. In it, [the assassin] asks for [a targeted dissident teacher’s] phone number and address. “The number was Jean-Luc’s and the address was his on Rue Saint Jacques. So you can see that I was the conformist wanting to kill the radical.”

Indeed, Bertolucci takes evident delight in the fact that, for all Godard’s Maoist contempt for The Conformist, a rising generation of film-makers saw his picture as a revelation. “What always made me proud - almost blushing with pride - is that Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg all told me that The Conformist is their first modern influence.”

(via)

Saul Bass designed title sequence for Walk on the Wild Side (1962, dir. Edward Dmytryk) (via)

Steven Spielberg remembers the “profound impression” made upon him as a 16-yr-old by the titles for Walk on the Wild Side. He recalls, ”I attempted to mimic Mr. Bass, using an 8mm camera and my dog on a leash walking along the narrow retaining wall outside my home in Scottsdale, Arizona. In trying to make my own movie…I made a foul error. I used a dog because we didn’t have a cat.  And as everyone knows, dogs are somewhat less sure-footed than felines. 

My cocker spaniel, Thunder, kept falling off the wall just as he got to the writer credit, did a tremendous pratfall on the producer credit, his legs went out from under him, and I got out of the titles business for good.”

-excerpted from Saul Bass: A Life In Film And Design

1930s imagining of 1980s New York in the sci-fi musical Just Imagine (1930, dir. David Butler) (via)

Designed by art director Stephen Goosson, the city set was an elaborate miniature model that covered a ground area of 75 x 225 feet and whose tallest tower measured 40 feet.

Just Imagine’s New York was primarily inspired by architect Harvey Corbett’s prediction that 1970’s New York would resemble a “very modernized Venice” and by the futuristic urban designs presented in Hugh Ferriss’s 1929 book, The Metropolis of Tomorrow.

Ferriss’s drawings of the ”business center of the future” (pictures #3-5) provided the most direct inspiration for Goosson’s sets. Broad superhighways establish a geometric ground plan that extends upward through overlapping levels of bridges, streets, and terraced walkways. The grid of streets and bridges is pierced by huge freestanding skyscrapers surrounded by lower setback buildings, a design Ferriss created as an analogy to the natural world of “towering mountain peaks… surrounded by foothills”

The opening scenes of the (otherwise mediocre) film, which feature this cityscape, can be seen here. 

More on the building of the Just Imagine set. Collection of Hugh Ferriss’s futuristic city sketches here.