Inspiration

A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career…

“The one thing you always have to have in your playing is hope. When you lose hope and you think to yourself, ‘ugh, what am I going to do with this?’ you’re not going to do anything …because you’ve already projected yourself, and I [the listener] have heard it and can tell you’re not committed…”…

Dear Mr. Howe, Your letter comes out of the blue and puts me on the spot. You ask how to become a director. […] You become a Director by calling yourself a Director and you then persuade other people that this is true. […] The Energy produced by working is more important than anything else!…

Well, you make games that have all the trappings of a blockbuster — in term of sparkle, budget, and scope — but if you look at all closely, you realize that what you’re doing is actually quite strange and conceptually audacious. It’s sort of like what Terrence Malick does, only video-game-ized. That’s a risky line…

[vimeo 40972394] “The best stories are about ‘One plus one equals three’.” “We all think that an exception is going to be made in our case and we’re going to live forever. Being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that that’s not going to be. Story is there to remind us that it’s…

 [youtube fxM0C7zjoAc] I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did…

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We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams;— World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems. Ode, from Music and Moonlight (1874) – Arthur O’Shaughness

Q : A critic who admires your work very much said that, in The Trial, you were repeating yourself… Welles : Exactly, I repeated myself. I believe we do it all the time. We always take up certain elements again. How can it be avoided? An actor’s voice always has the same timbre and, consequently, he repeats…

“What you learn from that first [film] – and I don’t call it ‘trial by fire’; I call it ‘baptism by fire’ – is that you are going to have to take all of the responsibility, because basically when it gets right down to it, you are going to get all of the blame, so…