Ingmar Bergman on Cries and Whispers (1972)

The best time in the writing, I think, is when I have no idea how to do it. I just play the game. I can lie down on the sofa and can look into the fire. I can go to the seaside and just sit down and do nothing, I just play the game and it’s wonderful. I make some notes, and I can go on for a year. Then, when I have made a plan, the difficult job starts. I have to sit down on my ass every morning at ten o’clock and write the screenplay. Then something very strange happens. Very often the personalities in my scripts don’t want the same thing I want. If I try to force them to do what I want them to do, it will always be an artistic catastrophe. But if I let them free to do what they want and what they tell me, it’s okay. So I think this is the only way to handle it. All intellectual decisions must come afterward.

You have seen Cries and Whispers? For half a year, I went around and just had a picture inside my head of three women walking around in a red room with white clothes. I couldn’t understand why these damned women were there. I tried to throw it away. I tried to write it down. I tried to find out what they said to each other, because they whispered. And suddenly it came out that they were watching another woman who was dying in the next room. Then the screenplay started—but it took about a year. It’s very strange. The script always starts with a picture with some kind of tension in it, and then slowly it comes out.

Jean Renoir on Grand Illusion (1937)

The director who is searching for an abstract emotion doesn’t need forms or faces of actors. He can talk directly from his own chest to the heart of a spectator. Myself, I am more in favor of the other method, which we could compare to what is the figurative art in painting. That doesn’t mean you cannot interweave all sorts of methods. I want to have an idea of the scene thanks to the rehearsal with the actors. When I have a clear idea of the scene, all of a sudden I realize everything I was doing was wrong, and I start again. Finally, when the scene shows something that seems to me sufficient, I bring the camera.

I’ll tell you a little story. It was during the shooting of my picture Grand Illusion. Perhaps some of you know the picture? You remember at the end Jean Gabin and Marcel Dalio are walking in the snow, and Dalio is wounded. He’d had a little accident and was limping. He couldn’t go any further. Well, I had written two pages of beautiful literature to explain the situation. Gabin was, you know, like a poet, explaining about what’s good, what’s bad in nature. It was fantastic and I was proud of myself. But I was a little worried because the two actors didn’t want to start the scene. They were finding resons to do something else. Finally Gabin said to me, “Jean, we’d better tell you: your two pages of beautiful poetry are just trash.” And it was true. Finally I had an idea, or perhaps it was Gabin. He was humming a tune I already used in the beginning of the picture—“The Little Sailor.” I took those very innocent words, and they became the center of the scene, which is, I think, very good.

But without the reluctance of Dalio, without my belief in the help the actors can give, I would have nothing. Nothing. Oh, I would have a perfectly drawn and conceived scene, but dull. Now, that explains, perhaps better than what I said before, my point of view with actors. In other words, you must not ask an actor to do what he cannot do. You know, there is an old slogan, very popular in our occidental civilization: you must look to an end higher than normal, and that way you will achieve something. Your aim must be very, very high. Myself, I am absolutely convinced that it is mere stupidity. The aim must be easy to reach, and by reaching it, you achieve more.

Billy Wilder on Sunset Boulevard (1950)

It was an idea that Charles Brackett and I had long before we tackled it. We wanted to do it, believe it for not, five years before we actually got around to it. We wanted to make a picture with a kind of a passé star. We wanted to do it with Mae West. That’s all I can tell you. But it didn’t come out this way.

There is no such thing as somebody sitting down and saying, “Now, all right, I’m going to make a new picture.” Not at all. You have ideas stashed away, dozens of them—good, bad or indifferent. Then you pull them out of your memory, out of your drawer, you combine them. An actor is available, and that’s the way it starts. People think when it comes to a screenplay you start with absolutely nothing. But the trouble is that you have a million ideas and you have to condense them into a thousand ideas, and you have to condense those into three hundred ideas to get it under one hat, as it were. In other words, you start with too much, not with nothing, and it can go in every kind of direction. Every possible avenue is open. Then you have to dramatize it—it is as simple as that—by omitting, by simplifying, by finding a clean theme that leads someplace.

Sunset Boulevard was a picture where everything sort of fell into my lap. I needed the Paramount studio, and we got permission to shoot at Paramount. I needed Cecil B. DeMille to play DeMille, and he played it. I needed somebody to play the part Stroheim played. Stroheim at one time had been a director and had, indeed, directed Gloria Swanson in Queen Kelly. We needed old faces and got Buster Keaton. Everything was just right.

When we made that picture with Gloria Swanson people forget that she herself was considered sort of an old bag from silent picture times. At the time when we shot the picture she was actually fifty years old, that was all. She was then three or four years younger than Audrey Hepburn is today. But it was the split, you know, the divide between sound pictures and silent pictures that made such a difference. She was actually very young for that thing. She was just forgotten because she had stopped making pictures when she was about thirty, when sound came in. But what would she be doing today? As you heard in the picture, she had those oil wells, pumping, pumping, pumping. I guess she would have four or five gigolos. She would now be living somewhere in Santa Barbara with George Hamilton.

Howard Hawks on Red River (1948)

In Red River, I wanted [John] Wayne to get his finger caught between the rope and the saddle horn and come in with it all mangled. Then Walter Brennan would look at it and say, “That finger isn’t going to be much good to you.” Wayne says, “No, it isn’t.” Brennan would say, “Get a jug and build the fire up good and get me a chopping block.” They’d start feeding him some liquor, and Brennan would say, “I guess he’s ready,” and he puts Wayne’s finger on the block and Brennan sharpens up the knife and cuts it off. Wayne wasn’t even supposed to know that it was cut off. But then his line was, “Where’s my finger? A man ought to be buried whole.” The scene ended with a bunch of fellows looking through the ashes for the finger. Wayne said to me, “You think that’s funny?” “Yeah,” I said, “but we don’t have to do it.” He said, “I don’t think it’s funny.” I said, “Okay, I’ll do it with some actor who’s better than you are.” And I did it with Kirk Douglas in The Big Sky, who isn’t nearly as good as Wayne. I think it’s the only time they laughed at Douglas. Wayne saw it and came around and said, “Well, I was wrong again. If you tell me a funeral is funny, I’ll do it.

When I hired [Montgomery] Clift he’d never made a picture before, and we took a look at him and Wayne said, “”Couldn’t you have gotten somebody who could stand up to me a little bit?” I said, “I think he can stand up to you pretty well.” We made the very first scene and he came over to me and said, “That kid is going to be good.” He said, “He looks like he’s just figuring that he can take me apart at any time and isn’t worried about it. One thing though—we can’t have a fight. It would be silly.” “Well,” I said, “you’re a lot bigger and it would be silly, but it wouldn’t be silly if you tripped and he kicked you in the face first.” “Okay, let him kick me in the face.” And we did it that way and it made a perfectly good fight. We had an awful time because Monty Clift couldn’t throw a punch. It took us three days.

[Clift] had something you rarely see today—he really wanted to work. He went out for two weeks with a box lunch and a cowboy and they didn’t come back all day. At the end of those two weeks he could ride a horse, he could handle a gun and he could even make a special little mount to get into the saddle. He worked like the devil.

Frank Capra on It Happened One Night (1934)

We didn’t write the film for [Clark] Gable. We wrote it for Robert Montgomery, who turned it down. Nobody would play it. No women would play it. Comedies don’t read very well in script form, especially light comedies. They’re too fluffy. Nobody gets killed, there are no wars, no whores. Five girls turned it down, and finally Claudette Colbert took it because we paid her a lot of money. But we were going to do away with the whole picture when we got a phone call from mister big shot out at MGM, Louis Mayer. He called Harry Cohn and said, “Herschel, I got a man for you to play that megillah in that film you couldn’t get off the ground.” And Harry Cohn said, “Oh, the hell with it. We’re calling it off.” Louis Mayer said, “Oh, no, I’ve got a man here who’s been a bad boy, and I’d like to punish him.” And Harry Cohn said, “Okay.” So the picture was on again because Louis Mayer wanted to punish Clark Gable. We wouldn’t have made the picture, you see, without Mr. Mayer wanting to send Gable to Siberia, which was Poverty Row, where we were. They had to triple his salary when he went back to MGM, after the film came out.