Your Characters Have To Remain

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

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

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 Time I Belonged To The Socialist Party, And Hitler Came To Power.

In The 19th Century, You Had Bourgeois Art Without Politics - An Almost Frozen Idea Of What Beauty Is.