Auteur Theory Quotes

“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

“No artist is ever happy with all the work they produce, so why should their critics be? Let artists be revered for their best works of art—even if it happens but once in a lifetime—and forget about the rest. All too often art is a wondrous accident, and it is folly to seek genius in its maker.”
― Anthony Marais

“On auteur theory: never has a critical movement so thoroughly ignored the one-hit wonders of its artform. Imagine music without these gems—half of pop rock would be gone and musicologists would have nothing to dig up!”
― Anthony Marais

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Don Simpson was right about Robert Altman.
Screenwriter, Ring Lardner wrote M*A*S*H (1970) and director Altman praised his script in early interviews.
After the movie was a hit, Altman said that he had tossed out Lardner’s script and written it himself.
The movie’s producer, George Litto, said, “Bob was never one to acknowledge a writer’s contribution. The movie was ninety percent Ring Lardner’s script, but Bob started saying he improvised the movie. I said,* ‘Bob, Ring Lardner gave you the best opportunity you had in your whole life. Ring was blacklisted for years. What you’re doing is very unfair to him and you ought to stop it.’

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― Joe Eszterhas, The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!