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Below are excerpts from, "Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age: At The American Film Institute" By George Stevens, Jr., Vintage Books, 2007.
"What is cinema? The assembly of pieces of film to create an idea. Each cut joined one to the other goes by on the screen and has an emotional impact upon an audience. I remember working at UFA in 1924, where they were making "The Last Laugh" with Emil Jannings. This film is to me the prime example of expressing a story even without titles. If you look at "The Last Laugh" today, you'll find the whole story is told visually, from beginning to end. It's the visual that has to be taught, the fundamentals of the medium. It is the only new art of the twentieth century, but it is essentially a visual art. And that's what has to be taught. Not by guessing and wondering how it will come out. Film students ought to be taught to know whatever they put down on paper will come out in a certain way." - Alfred Hitchcock, Pg. 266."The very idea of trying to manipulate---even to entertain an audience---when you get to the specifics, is quite beyond me, and so is trying to imagine what an audience would like. My God, I don't know what my best friend or wife or son or daughter would like. I only know what I like, and I hope that there are enough like me to feel the way I do about it." - John Huston. Pg. 342."I was the only one who gave Brecht a chance and I am very happy about it. Brecht could probably never understand that you work for an audience. He wanted to push his ideas on an audience. I was always opposed to the American line, "An audience has the mentality of a sixteen-year old chambermaid." If this would be true, I would be ashamed to work for such an audience. I like audiences, but I don't think you should give an audience something fifty steps ahead of them. I asked myself, why is the first work of a writer, of a screenwriter or of a playwright almost always a success? Because he still belongs to an audience. The more he goes away from the audience, the more he loses contact, and what I tried to do my whole life was not to lose contact with the audience." - Fritz Lang. Pg. 71-72."There was a real sense of collaboration back then. If you had a good picture, that was not enough. The other guy had to have a lousy one at the same time. It was a whole different spirit, it was a whole different kind of competition. We talked more about movies. We talked about "What are you doing? What's the picture about? What's the scene? What are you going to have in it?" Now they talk about "What kind of a deal did you get? What kind of percentage? Is it on the gross? Is it in turnaround? Is it a step deal? Is it negative pickup?" All of those things. We never heard of those things before---we just made movies." - Billy Wilder. Pg. 323-24."Writing and filmmaking and the creation of pictures are extremely close to our dreams.I think also the reception by the audience of a picture is very hypnotic. You sit there in a completely dark room, very anonymous, and you look on a lighted spot in front of you and you don't move. You sit and your eyes are concentrated on that white spot on the wall. I think this is exactly what some hypnotists do. They light a spot on the wall and ask you to follow it with your eyes, and then they talk to you and then they hypnotize you. It's quite different when you watch television. You sit at home, you have light around you. You have people you know around you, the telephone is ringing, you can go out and have a cup of coffee, the children are making noise.The film medium is some sort of magic where every frame comes and stands still for a fraction of a second and then it darkens. Half of the time when you see a picture you sit in darkness. Isn't that fascinating? That is magic. So we can be as intellectual as we want---we can be as sensible as we want. We are in the position of working with the most fascinating medium that exists in the world because, as with music, we go straight to the feelings. Afterward we can start to work with our intellect. If the picture is good, if the suggestions from the creator of the picture are strong enough, they'll give you thoughts later. You will start to think. They will be intellectually stimulating." - Ingmar Bergman. Pg. 644-45.
