In The 19th Century, You

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.

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

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.

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.