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On Directing Film

by David Mamet · 1991

According to David Mamet, a film director must, above all things, think visually. Most of this instructive and funny book is written in dialogue form and based on film classes Mamet taught at Columbia University. He… more

5 quotes ★ 3.80 (4,109) Nonfiction

Quotes from the Book

The audience can endorse the triviality of modern art, but they can’t like it.
3
Good luck will be the residue of good design.
The job of the film director is to tell the story through the juxtaposition of uninflected images—because that is the essential nature of the medium.
Just so with the movie, which is why bad filmmaking can "succeed." It is our nature to want to make sense of these events—we can't help it. The human mind would make sense of them even if they were a random juxtaposition.
Performance art" works, as it's the nature of human perception to order random images in favor of an overriding preconception. Another example of this is neurosis. Neurosis is the ordering of unrelated events or ideas or images in favor of an overriding preconception. "I am," for example, "an unsightly person": that's the overriding preconception. then given any two unrelated events I can order them to make them mean that. "Oh, yes, I understand. This woman came out of the hall and did not seem to notice me and rushed into the elevator and quickly pushed the button and the elevator closed because I am an unattractive person.

About David Mamet

We have collected 11 quotes from 2 books by David Mamet on BookQuoters.

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About the book

According to David Mamet, a film director must, above all things, think visually. Most of this instructive and funny book is written in dialogue form and based on film classes Mamet taught at Columbia University. He encourages his students to tell their stories not with words, but through the juxtaposition of uninflected images. The best films, Mamet argues, are composed of simple shots. The great filmmaker understands that the burden of cinematic storytelling lies less in the individual shot than in the collective meaning that shots convey when they are edited together. Mamet borrows many of his ideas about directing, writing, and acting from Russian masters such as Konstantin Stanislavsky, Sergei M. Eisenstein, and Vsevelod Pudovkin, but he presents his material in so delightful and lively a fashion that he revitalizes it for the contemporary reader.

Book details

First published
1991
Goodreads rating
3.80 (4k ratings)

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