Whit Stillman Quotes

Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.

I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe.

I feel terrible about it. Part of it is the horror of what happened and part of it is my guilt about being a part of it.

Thrillers rely on certain archetypes and our familiarity with them is quietly driving all of the tension. So it becomes an interesting challenge from the score perspective, to enhance that tension without being noticed, just like those archetypes.

From the body of one guilty deed a thousand ghostly fears and haunting thoughts proceed.

If someone's lying to us, then it's rare that we know that they're lying to us. It's only in bad films that you recognize immediately that an actor's playing in such a way that you can see that he's lying, and that's simply dumb. But to reach that, it requires that you make a film in such a way that a spectator feels compelled to find his own explanation. You want to lead the spectator to find his own interpretation. To ask questions rather than provide all of the answers. Doing that leads to open endings and open dramaturgy.

Also expressionistic filmmaking - making the audience feel like they were inside the characters' heads. And so we create all these different types of techniques to put the audience there.

I need to talk to Lena" There it was. I'd finally said it. The one thing that had kept me from being able to exhale all day. The thing that had made me feel like I couldn't sit down, like I couldn't stay. Like I had to get up and go somewhere, even if I had nowhere to go.

Guilt and no guilt: these were the worst things. The only thing worse than the guilt was the fear of getting caught.

My mother could make anybody feel guilty - she used to get letters of apology from people she didn't even know.

Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

Modern man is weighed down more by the burden of responsibility than by the burden of sin. We think him more a savior who shoulders our responsibilities than him who shoulders our sins. If instead of making decisions we have but to obey and do our duty, we feel it as a sort of salvation.

I've been patiently waiting to blow!

If you kill a character people feel sad. That's too easy.

The hands of the guilty don't necessarily tremble; only in stories does a dropped glass betray agitation. Tension is more often shown in the studied action.

Feares are divided in the midst.

A sin takes on a new and real terror when there seems a chance that it is going to be found out.

One thing about this face was very strange and startling. You could not look upon it in its most cheerful mood without feeling that it had some extraordinary capacity of expressing terror. It was not on the surface. It was in no one feature that it lingered. You could not take the eyes or mouth, or lines upon the cheek, and say, if this or that were otherwise, it would not be so. Yet there it always lurked-something for ever dimly seen, but ever there, and never absent for a moment.

I find that usually when I watch something like horror film, I'm constantly thinking no, it's not going to happen.

Norman Bates heard the noise and a shock went through him.

People say you need to be strong, smart, and lucky to survive hard times, war, a natural disaster, or physical torture. But I say emotional abuse—anxiety, fear, guilt, and degradation—is far worse and much harder to survive.

Having the audience know more than the characters is precisely where you want to be in terms of drama. You can engage them much more when that is the case.

Don't worry about me," I finally said. "Really. I'm more worried about you." And even more worried about where Graves is. "Are you?" A fey smile lit his face, and I caught my breath. It was a shock to see him look so happy. "Well, then.

Guilt is altruism's stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuati on.

Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.