Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.
— 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.
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.
At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political.
A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.
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.
Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.
The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy.
Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.
In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.
I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.
I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.
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.
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.
You have to think with the heart.
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.
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.
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.
If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.
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 considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.
At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.
And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.
