Michael Powell Quotes

“I live cinema. I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from then on my memories virtually coincide with the history of the cinema … I'm not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through cinema; everything that I've had in the way of education has been through the cinema; insofar as I'm interested in images, in books, in music, it's all due to the cinema.”

“For ten years we had all been told to go out and die for freedom and democracy; but now the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for art.”

“Seventy years ago there were men like D. W. Griffith and seventy years later - now - there are not many men like Martin Scorsese. But so long as there is one there will be others, and the art of the cinema will survive.”

“I am the teller of the tale, not the creator of the story.”

“The great innovators have always been fearless…. I have fallen off haystacks, out of trees, over cliffs. I have been nearly drowned, shot and hanged. I have been in countless car crashes without getting a scratch. I have been alone in an office with Louis B. Mayer.”

“The truth lies in black and white.”

“[of his wife Frankie] "In fact, if only I had been the perfect husband, she would have been the perfect wife."”

“I got my first assignment as a director in 1927. I was slim, arrogant, intelligent, foolish, shy, cocksure, dreamy and irritating. Today, I'm no longer slim.”

“Art is merciless observation, sympathy, imagination, and a sense of detachment that is almost cruelty.”

“Actors and technicians were being demobbed every day. Very soon the only ham actor left in the combined forces would be General George Patton.”

“Jack Cardiff once asked Powell "Michael, do you make films for all types of audiences, or just for yourself?" Michael shook his head vigorously. "I make films for myself. What I express I hope most people will understand. For the rest, well, that's their problem."”

“Everyone has heard of Canterbury if only because they murder archbishops there.”

“[After Peeping Tom] When they got me on my own [the critics] gleefully sawed off the limb and jumped up and down on the corpse.”

“My master in film, Buñuel, was a far greater storyteller than I. It was just that in my films miracles occur on the screen.”