If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage.
Samuel FullerRead
A film is like a battleground. It's love, hate, action, violence, death—In one word, emotions.
Interpretation
A film encapsulates a range of emotions and experiences, portraying the complexities of human feelings.
Samuel Fuller compares filmmaking to a battleground, emphasizing that films evoke intense emotions such as love, hate, action, and violence. This metaphor portrays cinema as an arena where various emotions clash and harmonize, reflecting the multifaceted nature of human experiences and relationships.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a discussion at a film festival highlighting the emotional depth of cinema.
If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage.
I don't care if it's a mystery story, a Western, or the story of Julius Caesar. To me it's the emotion, the lies, the double-cross, whether it's Brutus doing it to Caesar or Bob Stack doing it to Robert Ryan that defines what kind of drama it is.
If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
If a serious statement is defined as one that may be made in terms of waking life, poetry will never rise to the level of seriousness. It lies beyond seriousness, on that more primitive and original level where the child, the animal, the savage, and the seer belong, in the region of dream, enchantment, ecstasy, laughter. To understand poetry we must be capable of donning the child's soul like a magic cloak and of forsaking man's wisdom for the child's.
We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art.
Black and white might be sufficient. But why deprive yourself of color.
I lived for 15 years in Los Angeles, and I still can't believe that the handsomest man in the world, Cary Grant, and the greatest performer in the world, Fred Astaire, and Johnny Carson, one after another - they were all in my home at different times. I celebrated my 50th birthday with them. Unforgettable.
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