Douglas Sirk Quotations

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.

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.

At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political.

I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.

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

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.

And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world.

But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.

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. But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them

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

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.

A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.

At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.

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

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

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

For a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty.

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.

When we first came to America, I bought a tiny piece of land far out in the country. But there was no place to live on it, only a shed.

Only on Thunder did I have a producer who was interfering with my work. He was the only one at Universal. After that film I believe they fired him.

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.

There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can't reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections

You have to think with the heart.

If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.

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.

I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart.

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.

Now in theory, if there is no straight line in the universe, this has its effect on art. Art must consist of something bent, something curved.

I knew Law, and I knew theater. I didn't, of course, know American law, and in America the theater did not exist, except for Broadway.

I didn't think I could continue to do the melodrama as I had done in Germany. I couldn't know how it would go over with audiences here.