Douglas Sirk Quotes

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

  Douglas Sirk

• 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

• You have to think with the heart.

  Douglas Sirk

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Douglas Sirk

• 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

• 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

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

  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

• 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

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

  Douglas Sirk

• If I couldn’t read, I couldn’t live.

  Douglas Sirk

• 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

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

  Douglas Sirk

• 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

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

  Douglas Sirk

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

  Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk (28)

Birth:	26th April, 1897
Death:	14th January, 1987
Nationality:	German
Profession:	Film Director

About

Douglas Sirk was born in Hamburg, Germany. He was a German film director best known for his work in Hollywood melodramas in the 1950s. He left Germany in 1937. He briefly returned to Germany after the War ended, but returned to the U.S. and established his reputation with a series of lush, colorful melodramas for Universal-International Pictures from 1952 to 1959: Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, A Time to Love and a Time to Die, and Imitation of Life.

Related Authors

• Joan Chen
• Demi Moore
• Chris Rock
• Pen Densham
• George Seaton
• Michel Hazanavicius
• Crispin Glover
• William Wyler
• Henry Winkler
• John Lee Hancock

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 29th April

Births

• 1957 - Daniel Day-Lewis
• 1952 - Nora Eloise Dunn
• 1721 - Roger Sherman
• 1929 - Maurice F. Strong
• 1940 - Uma Thurman

Deaths

• 1827 - Rufus King
• 1997 - Mike Royko
• 1894 - Joseph Kirkland
• 1937 - William Gillette
• 1951 - Ludwig Wittgenstein