Ernst Lubitsch
January 28, 1892 – November 30, 1947

“I still remember the day of the funeral. After the ceremony, William Wyler and I walked silently to our cars. Finally I said, just to say something to break the silence, ‘No more Lubitsch.’ To which Wyler replied, ‘Worse than that—no more Lubitsch films.’ How right we were. For twenty years since then we all tried to find the secret of the ‘Lubitsch touch.’ Nothing doing. Oh, if we were lucky, we sometimes managed a few feet of film here and there in our work that momentarily sparkled like Lubitsch. Like Lubitsch, not real Lubitsch. His art is lost. That most elegant of screen magicians took his secret with him.” — Billy Wilder

“It’s my desire to find a liberation from the confinement of the traditional Japanese art world, with its narrow, rigid ideas, and create things that belong to the whole world. If you wish to create something new, first go back to the roots from which the creative dynamic flows and then choose your own path.”

Hiroshi Teshigahara
January 28, 1927 – April 14, 2001

“I was quite tired of the entertainment Arne Mattsson made me perform, where I had to run blonde and beautiful through a meadow hand in hand with a young man. Bergman made me so ugly as soon as he clapped eyes on me, so I didn’t need to feel that I was putting on a show. Those difficult, psychological roles suited me better.”

Ingrid Thulin
January 27, 1926 — January 7, 2004

Girlfriend is Better — Talking Heads

Andrei Tarkovsky on the set of Solaris.

JEANNE MOREAU: A LUMINOUS MEMORY
François Truffaut, 1979

The woman is passionate, the actress is passionately enthralling. If I imagine her at a distance, I do not see her reading a newspaper but a book.

Jeanne Moreau doesn’t make you think of a flirtation but of love.

Unlike so many actors and actresses who can’t manage to act except by means of conflicts and tensions, to the point of sometimes confusing “concentration” with those camps of sinister memory, Jeanne Moreau is at her best in a merry and tender working environment, which she does her bit to create and which she helps preserve even when there are powerful emotions to be projected. Generosity, ardor, complicity, comprehension of human fragility: all that can be read on the screen when Jeanne Moreau is acting.

In all my twenty years of cinema, the filming of Jules and Jim, thanks to Jeanne Moreau, remains a luminous memory, the most luminous.

Night on Earth // dir. Jim Jarmusch

“I don’t want to be mainstream. I like being in the margins. I’m happy where I exist. The things that inspire me I find in the margins. I’m not consciously trying to be marginal, it’s just where I end up and where I live. There’s a gift in there for me and I’m happy to have that gift.”

Jim Jarmusch
Born January 22, 1953

Behind the scenes of Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria.

You refused lucrative offers from Hollywood. You probably could have made millions of dollars.
Perhaps I could become the richest man in the world, or even the poorest. More likely the latter. No, I simply cannot imagine leading my army into my creative battles in any other way than my own. What good is money in exchange for giving up my independence, my friends, my Roman restaurants, my crazy Italian people, traffic at rush hour by the Colosseum? I would have made money and lost my joy of life. And that’s all filming has been about for me: joy of life, battle of life, comedy of life, fascination of life. Life! Life! Life!

Federico Fellini
January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993