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

“There’s some line I read about the longing for the euphoria of forgotten childhood dreams. And [my childhood] was like a dream. Airplanes passed by slowly in the sky. Rubber toys floated on the water. Meals seemed to last five years and nap time seemed endless. And the world was so small. I can’t remember being able to see more than a couple of blocks. And those couple of blocks were huge. So all the details were blown out of proportion. Blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry tree there’s pitch oozing out—some of it’s black, some of it’s yellow, and there are millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at the beautiful world, there’s always red ants underneath.”

David Lynch
Born January 20, 1946

“I hate seeing people getting hurt or hurting other people. I hate seeing blood. I am very intolerant of physical pain. I find violence horrifying, so much so that I can’t help being intrigued by it. I think I am more of a coward than anybody. It’s a very weird feeling. The more I fear violence, the more I’m inclined to depict it in films. It just so happens that violent movies, like Sonatine, Fireworks, and so on, have tended to get more popular, although I’ve made just as many films where violence plays very little part, such as Dolls, Kikujiro, Kids Return, Getting Any?, and A Scene At The Sea. What is ironic is that when I made those movies, the journalists still wanted me to talk about violence: ‘Why no violence this time?’”

Takeshi Kitano
Born January 18, 1947

“Since my very first films, primarily Night and Fog in Japan, certain critics have picked up on a shot that for them was characteristic of my work, one where a flame burns in the dark. For me, this flame represents the lives of my characters. But it’s also an image of our lives. I often cite this maxim: ‘Just like the fish that dwell in the abyss, we cannot find the light until we ourselves shine.’”

Nagisa Oshima
March 31, 1932 - January 15, 2013

60sforever:

大島 渚 Nagisa Oshima (March 31, 1932 - January 15, 2013).  R.I.P  

What did Some Like It Hot look like the first time you saw it edited together?
BILLY WILDER: Any first cut of the picture makes you feel suicidal. It’s just the worst moment of your life. Every picture, you say, “Oh my God.” Because you’ve worked, you’ve slaved, this is a year and a half of your life, and then you look and there it is, an hour and fifty-five minutes, and you say, “Is that all there is? For that, a year and a half? My God.” But then you start cutting, and a little music comes in and then you kind of polish it, and it’s just like night and day. And it’s all worth it. When you preview a picture that really works, you feel that you’ve got the audience by the throat. It’s not very often. That’s why I say when you’ve got them by the throat, don’t let go. Just squeeze harder and get them in the gut and stamp on them because they are such bastards. They fight you; they come in and say, “I don’t want to like it. I hope that son of a bitch falls on his face.” And you don’t want to let them go because you suddenly sense “I’ve got them,” whether it’s a dramatic scene or the laughter has started. Once you get them into a mood of “Hey, this is funny,” then you can say anything.

“I’ve come to like the term ‘poetic film.’ Now there are dangers in it. Poetry is a totally different art than film. But it separates what my contemporaries and I do from the Hollywood movie, in a way that doesn’t assume that one is greater than the other. Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever. The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.”

Stan Brakhage
January 14, 1933 – March 9, 2003

Film posters by Cuban artist Antonio Fernández Reboiro.

Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann photographed by Gunnar Källström near their home in Fårö on July 14, 1968, Ingmar’s 50th birthday.

Jean Cocteau by Jane Bown. 1950.