Douglas Sirk quotes

Douglas Sirk was a German film director, renowned for his stylish Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s. His films are celebrated for their visual artistry and underlying social critique. He influenced generations of filmmakers with his unique approach to storytelling and emotion. Here are 28 of his quotes:

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. (Douglas Sirk)

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

Douglas Sirk

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.

Douglas Sirk

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.

Douglas Sirk

And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.

Douglas Sirk

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.

Douglas Sirk

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.

Douglas Sirk

You have to think with the heart.

Douglas Sirk

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.

Douglas Sirk

Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.

Douglas Sirk

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. (Douglas Sirk)

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.

Douglas Sirk

I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.

Douglas Sirk

A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.

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.

Douglas Sirk

Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.

Douglas Sirk

I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.

Douglas Sirk

At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.

Douglas Sirk

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

Douglas Sirk

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.

Douglas Sirk

I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart. (Douglas Sirk)

If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.

Douglas Sirk

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.

Douglas Sirk

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.

Douglas Sirk

At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political.

Douglas Sirk

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Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk - Image

Occupation: German Director
Born: April 26, 1897
Died: January 14, 1987
Quotes count: 28

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