The films that John Huston (1901-1986) directed — including The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of Sierra Madre, The African Queen, Moby Dick, and Chinatown — correctly suggest what an interesting person he was to know when not at work.
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These are among his most widely quoted observations:
o The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world.
o I don’t try to guess what a million people will like. It’s hard enough to know what I like.
o Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place they’re capable of anything.
o I prefer to think that God is not dead, just drunk.
o I relieve myself from the rigours of directing by casting the movie correctly.
o Hollywood has always been a cage…a cage to catch our dreams
o A work of art doesn’t dare you to realize it. It germinates and gestates by itself.
o A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.
o Talk to them about things they don’t know. Try to give them an inferiority complex. If the actress is beautiful, screw her. If she isn’t, present her with a valuable painting she will not understand. If they insist on being boring, kick their asses or twist their noses. And that’s about all there is to it.
o Even Michelangelo on his deathbed thought he’d done nothing to ennoble art. He wanted to destroy his work-the Pieta! And this from the greatest artist who ever lived. Of course I am not comparing my work to Michelangelo’s. But this eternal dissatisfaction of the artist is what I was talking about.
o What to do when inspiration doesn’t come; be careful not to spook, get the wind up, force things into position. You must wait around until the idea comes.
o You walk through a series of arches, so to speak, and then, presently, at the end of a corridor, a door opens and you see backward through time, and you feel the flow of time, and realize you are only part of a great nameless procession.
o When you make motion pictures, each picture is a life unto itself. When you finish and the picture is over, there’s an understanding, a realization that we’ll never be assembled this way again. That these relationships are severed forever and ever. And each of these films is a little life.
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An eccentric rebel of epic proportions, John Huston reigned supreme as director, screenwriter and character actor in a career that endured over five decades. The ten-time Oscar-nominated legend was born John Marcellus Huston in Nevada, Missouri, on August 5, 1906. His ancestry was English, Scottish, Scots-Irish, distant German and very remote Portuguese. The age-old story goes that the small town of his birth was won by John’s grandfather in a poker game. John’s father was the equally magnanimous character actor Walter Huston, and his mother, Rhea Gore, was a newspaperwoman who traveled around the country looking for stories.
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