Poster for October (1927)

This silent Russian film by Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei M. Eisenstein was commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Soviet revolution. While Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) is considered to be one of the most innovative films ever made, October is even more daring in its approach.

In a letter to Leon Moussinac dated December 16, 1928, Eisenstein wrote that “in this film that is so much of the ‘people,’ of the ‘masses,’ I allowed myself to experiment.” Later in the letter, he wrote, “October is the dialectical denial of Potemkin! And the main interest of October is in the bits and pieces which do not resemble the ‘Battleship.'”

Françoise Truffaut: Would you say that Psycho [1960] is an experimental film?

Alfred Hitchcock: Possibly. My main satisfaction is that the film had an effect on the audiences, and I consider that very important. I don’t care about the subject matter; I don’t care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all the technical ingredients that make the audience scream. I feel it’s tremendously satisfying for us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. It wasn’t a message that stirred the audiences, nor was it a great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure film.

— Alfred Hitchcock, interviewed in 1962 by Françoise Truffaut

Lorraine: You remember Anne Lowell?
Andy: Not Anytime Annie? Say, who could forget ‘er? She only said “No” once, and then she didn’t hear the question!

Ann: You know, it’s a shame your mother didn’t have any children!

Julian: Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It’s the lives of all these people who’ve worked with you. You’ve got to go on, and you’ve got to give and give and give. They’ve got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can’t fall down. You can’t because your future’s in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I’m through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out, and Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster but you’ve got to come back a star!

— Dialogue from 42nd Street (1933)

“Greed [1924] was, up to that time, and perhaps even to now the only film in which there was not one set in a studio used. I had rented an old uninhabited house on Gower Street in San Francisco, furnished the rooms in the exact way in which the author had described them, and photographed there with only very few lamps, and the daylight which penetrated through the windows. Of course this was not to the cameraman’s liking, but I insisted — and we got some very good photographic results. In order to make the actors really feel the characters they were to portray I made them live in those rooms.”

— Erich von Stroheim, as quoted in Hollywood Scapegoat (1950)

“I sit in the lobby and I watch people. I like to watch people. Once in a while someone will ask me where Stan and I dreamed up the characters we play in the movies. They seem to think that these two fellows aren’t like anybody else. I know they’re dumber than anyone else, but there are plenty of Laurels and Hardys in the world. Whenever I travel, I still am in the habit of sitting in the lobby and watching the people walk by — and I tell you I see many Laurels and Hardys.”

— Oliver Hardy, interviewed for Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy (1961)

“[John Ford was] the director I liked working with better than anybody in the industry. You’d talk, I think you might say, 50 words to him in a day; you had a communication with him so great you could sense what he wanted. He knew nothing of lighting; he never once looked in the camera when we worked together. You see, the man had bad eyes, as long as I knew him, but he was a man whose veins ran with the business. He had a tremendous memory; he could come up with an idea from some picture he had made 30 years before, and suggest you did that.

“I’ve had people offer me money to give them the formula that Jack Ford used to direct. But he had no formula. . . .”

— Arthur C. Miller, who started as a cinematographer in 1910, interviewed for Hollywood Cameramen (1970)

“This is the way we made those one-reelers: Monday morning I would bring the group in and say, “You make up as a cop, you make up as a garbageman, you make up as a pedestrian.” We’d go out in the park, and we’d start to do something. By that time, I’d have an idea of what the sets were going to be. By noon, I would tell the set man what I wanted, and he would go back to the studio to get them ready.

“I don’t think we ever had anything on paper until we started making 2-reelers with lights. Nobody but me had any idea what the hell we were going to do. We’d try one thing, it wasn’t funny; we’d try something else.”

— Hal Roach, interviewed for The Real Tinsel (1970)