Quotes

[on CinemaScope] It's fine if you want a system that shows a boa constrictor to better advantage than a man.

[on The Talk of the Town (1942)] I knew it was going to come off all along: it didn't have that element of hazard in it. It was more of an understood flight with a take-off time and an arrival time and not too much headwind.

[1967] I just knew that if you engaged the audience with a promise that something would develop, you were in business. If not, you had to contrive automatic ridiculousness continuously. Comedy, in this sense, is all about preparation. Things have to be arranged and set up - cause and effect - and if the cause is apparent to the audience, they'll stick with it until their sagacity is rewarded. It's their intelligence that foresees things, while the comic character doesn't.

If a director is lucky enough to work with Irene Dunne, his worries disappear. Every scene she's in matches; she's the film editor's delight. I would say she's just about as "careless" as George Arliss.

[on James Dean] All in all, it was a hell of a headache to work with him.

[on Jean Arthur] One of the greatest comediennes the screen has ever seen. When she works, she gives everything that's in her, and she studies her roles more than most of the actresses I've known.

[in response to a question from Shelley Winters on the difference between stage and screen acting] Shelley, in films you talk soft and think loud.

[whispered to Irene Dunne during filming of I Remember Mama (1948)] For a woman who wears white gloves to work in the morning, you certainly know how to scrub a floor.

War is the tenseness, the eternal waiting, the warping or ennobling of character that constant strain produces. To me, the greatest war shot is of a taut G.I. in a foxhole, nervously puffing a cigarette. That's war.

Only an audience can give validity to a film, and as a filmmaker you are constantly searching for this community of acceptance. There's nothing quite as unresponsive as a white sheet at the far end of an auditorium in front of an arrangement of chairs. The audience gives a film credence, they draw from their knowledge to determine whether what they're watching is valid. There is always that moment of truth when you've finally put the film together, and you're running it in a theater and being subjected to what could be the very unfriendly scrutiny of the audience. Sometimes you discover they're with you, and that's great pleasure. And also during that voyage of discovery you're finding where you're sailing a different course from the audience, a lesson that's not to be forgotten.