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"The movie is not only about the little big Oskar it is about contemporary history too. In line with the book, the film is an epic."

34 years ago today: Volker Schlöndorffs The Tin Drum wins the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

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"But the cinephile is … a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies."

François Truffaut February 6, 1932 - October 21, 1984

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"I'm just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it's far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It's not just an art form; it's actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It's my way of telling a story."

Federico Fellini January 20, 1920 - October 31, 1993

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"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.”

Orson Welles

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"It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it."

Andy Warhol August 6, 1928 - February 22, 1987

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"The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it."

John Huston August 5, 1906 - August 28, 1987

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How much planning do you do before you start to shoot a scene? As much as there are hours in the day, and days in the week. I think about a film almost continuously. I try to visualize it and I try to work out every conceivable variation of ideas which might exist with respect to the various scenes, but I have found that when you finally come down to the day the scene is going to be shot and you arrive on the location with the actors, having had the experience of already seeing some scenes shot, somehow it’s always different. You find out that you have not really explored the scene to its fullest extent. You may have been thinking about it incorrectly, or you may simply not have discovered one of the variations which now in context with everything else that you have shot is simply better than anything you had previously thought of. The reality of the final moment, just before shooting, is so powerful that all previous analysis must yield before the impressions you receive under these circumstances, and unless you use this feedback to your positive advantage, unless you adjust to it, adapt to it and accept the sometimes terrifying weaknesses it can expose, you can never realize the most out of your film.

Stanley Kubrick July 26, 1928 — March 7, 1999

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Wim Wenders and Peter Falk on the set of Wings of Desire

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John Cassavetes

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"But I'm never gonna get to a point in my life where what it costs to shoot a movie is going to determine what it is. The limits of my imagination is the only thing that's gonna stop me."

Abel Ferrara July 19, 1951

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"Which genre my film ultimately belongs in is up to the audience to decide when the film is finished, but certainly as a starting point I always start my next project considering which genre I would like to work in. So in that sense I am a genre director. 

Actually, I’m often misunderstood. I don’t start with a philosophical or thematical approach. Instead I often start with a genre that’s relatively easy to understand and then explore how I want to work in that genre. And that’s how a theme or an approach develops. The genre is first."

Kiyoshi Kurosawa July 19, 1955

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“The Development of a script is a cruel and boring process. The actual filming, however, is a real treat. I am a visual thinker. For me, a close-up of a face is ten times more powerful and meaningful than a dialogue."

Wong Kar-Wai July 17, 1958

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"Private Confessions he said was one of his favorite films, and he wanted me to do it because he felt that I really believed in God and did not question him. He claimed he could never do that film because, as he said, "I don't believe in God." But I don’t think it was true. With Faithless, he wasn't allowed to see it until it was finished and edited. There, he had things that he didn’t like or wanted taken out of the film. Because the film was so personal, he felt maybe I had overspread or lied because I knew him so well. But the strange thing about the movie: There’s a character Erland Josephson plays, called “Bergman,” and Ingmar said that this character is not him, that he just happened to give him that name, which is funny. But there’s a scene where “Bergman” goes to a window and he looks out and sees himself walking on the beach. That scene is not in the script. And Ingmar said, "You have to take that out. Take that out." And so I took it out when it was shown in Cannes, but later Ingmar called me and said to put it back in. And the strange thing is that when Ingmar made his own documentary much later, there is a scene where he's sitting at his writing table, and then he gets up from his table and goes to the window and looks out, and who does he see on the beach but himself?"

Liv Ullman

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"I never think the way I make movies has any relation to his; he’s like God to me. I will take inspiration. I won’t dare to imitate." - Ang Lee

"If you were alive in the 50s and the 60s and of a certain age, a teenager on your way to becoming an adult, and you wanted to make movies, I don't see how you couldn't be influenced by Bergman." - Martin Scorsese

"I believe he is the greatest film-maker at work today." - Stanley Kubrick

"Yet there has been no body of work of the calibre and integrity of Bergman's." - Francois Truffaut

"He's quite marvelous because he leaves the initiative to you and he's open to suggestions. It can sometimes be a wonderful give and take relationship." - Max von Sydow

"That whole group of films that came out then told us that Bergman was a magical filmmaker. There had never been anything like it, this combination of intellectual artist and film technician. His technique was sensational." - Woody Allen

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"Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls."

Ingmar Bergman July 14, 1918 - July 30, 2007

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"I don't mind doing interviews. I don't mind answering thoughtful questions. But I'm not thrilled about answering questions like, 'If you were being mugged, and you had a lightsaber in one pocket and a whip in the other, which would you use?' "

Harrison Ford July 13, 1942

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"The idea of the road movie as a separate genre is, in a way, a little absurd because every movie is in some way a road movie... I believe the best movies are road movies. The road is very enigmatic. The road is life."

Monte Hellman July 12, 1932