Douglas Sirk Quotes

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

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.

You have to think with the 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.

Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.

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.

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.

The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy.

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.

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.

Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.

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.

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.

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics – an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

If I couldn’t read, I couldn’t live.

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.

I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.

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.

I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.