Douglas Sirk Quotes
"Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Eye)
"You have to think with the heart."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Heart)
"Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Opportunity, American, Comedy, Project, Scandal)
"Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic."
- Douglas Sirk
"These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Promise, World)
"There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Art, Politics, Belief, Style)
"The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Art, War, End, Philosophy, Trying)
"So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Art, Idea, American, Mind, Perfection)
"Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Body, Man)
"Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after."
- Douglas Sirk
"Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: America, Americans, Intellectuals)
"In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Art, Beauty, Politics, Idea)
"If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Thought, Nothing, Reason)
"I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Home, Society, Wife, American)
"I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Thought, Heart, Artists, Literature)
"I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Style)
"I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: People)
"For a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Church, Land, Old)
"But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: World)
"At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Power, Time, Party)
"At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Art, Time, Marxism)
"And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Now, Relativity, Theory, World)
"And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Movies)
"A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Time, Hollywood)
"Ross Hunter was my assistant on Take Me to Town, He was a young man, an actor before that, and learned a lot on the picture. During shooting, Goldstein left, and Ross was most pleasant. He never interfered."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Actor, Man)
"If I couldn't read, I couldn't live."
- Douglas Sirk
"My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life."
- Douglas Sirk
(Related: Life, Time, People, Idea, American)