Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Alfred Hitchcock on Hollywood

"A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it."
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"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
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"In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director."
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"Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up everytime."
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"The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."
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"There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it."
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"Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms."
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"Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare."
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"Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders."
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"I don't understand why we have to experiment with film. I think everything should be done on paper. A musician has to do it, a composer. He puts a lot of dots down and beautiful music comes out. And I think that students should be taught to visualize. That's the one thing missing in all this. The one thing that the student has got to do is to learn that there is a rectangle up there - a white rectangle in a theater - and it has to be filled."