Douglas Sirk - biography

“George Sanders had a great capacity for understanding in-between values, being an in-between person himself...  I thought he was great in all the pictures he did with me.”

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

“When I came to America, I found John Wayne being appreciated as the most wooden and incompetent leading man in pictures.  No one ever had a worse press.  In every picture, he was panned by virtually every critic.  I always thought he was a great movie actor, even though I never agreed with his politics.  I should like to call him an outstanding personage of undiminished power and simplicity.”

“Any appreciation of the American cinema, I think, involves an appreciation of the Western and also of the melodrama.”

“I think I was one of the few German emigres who came to America with a certain background of reading about the country, and a great interest in it - and I was about the only one who got around and about.  I used to travel whenever I could,”

“I was in love with America, and I often have a great nostalgia for it.  Not for Hollywood, but for the West, for Oregon and the North-West in particular.”

“When I was at Universal, I had a plan to make a sequence of films about America, mainly about middle-class America and aspects of society I was interested in.  But it did not come off as I had hoped.”

“I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.”

“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.”

“A great movie-maker who influenced me early on was Lubitsch.  He had a definite influence on certain sections of my theatre work, on my staging of comedies.  He then was incredibly modern as a picture director - particularly one film, The Marriage Circle, was very important to me in this respect.  It had a kind of lasting impact.”

“I value comedy greatly.  Lubitsch was able to walk the very narrow path between the absurd and the realistic.”

“I’ve loved [John] Ford from way, way back - this is long before I went to the States - and I remain an ardent admirer of his works.  Pictures like How Green Was My Valley, or The Searchers, or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are wonderful, full of cinematic wonders.”

“Murnau certainly was a great influence and hit me earlier in life than Renoir.  Tabu and Sunrise are both exceptional pictures, Faust less so, but probably you can’t press Goethe’s work into a picture - it is too big, too wide, the words are too important.”

“[Jean] Renoir is a great director, and it would be extremely tough to match styles with him.  His lighting, for a start, is very different from my own style of lighting...  But his directing had a great influence on me - and this goes right back to my theatre days.  I think his films influenced even my stage work - this Mozartian touch he has.  And then he also has an eye like a painter.  When I saw Nana, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world.  I also liked his American movies very much indeed.  The Southerner I really loved.”

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

“Angling is terribly important: I discovered this for the first time with Pillars of Society.  The angles are the director’s thoughts.  The lighting is his philosophy.”

“From Schlussakkord onwards, I got right away and tried to develop a cinema style.  I began to understand that the camera is the main thing here, because there is emotion in the motion pictures.  Motion is emotion, in a way it can never be in the theatre.”

“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.”

“If I had to stage Magnificent Obession as a play, I wouldn’t have survived.  It is a combination of kitsch, and craziness and trashiness.  But craziness is very important and it saves trashy stuff like Magnificent Obsession.”

“Long before Wittgenstein, I and some of my contemporaries learned to distrust language as a true medium and interpreter of reality.  So I learned to trust my eyes rather more than the windiness of words.”

“The mirror is the imitation of life.  What is interesting about a mirror is that it does not show you yourself as you are, it shows you your opposite.”

“This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”

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

“What is important in picture-making is the ability to recognise a film in its continuity.  During the shooting of Schlussakkord, I realised there has to be a sustained mood of acting, lighting, and so on, and you will see this style for the first time in Schlussakkord.  But I had got a number of insights before that.  This sustained mood is very important.”

“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.”

“I was deeply impressed by The Passion of Joan of Arc.  I learnt from it the importance of certain hesitating cuts, which throw tremendous energy on a story.  Dreyer had developed this slowness to an almost unbearable degree, but there is the whole Middle Ages in it - its slow, precise, and deadly way of thinking.  It harbours a threat by being so slow.  You can see it in some of my pictures.”

“[Written on the Wind] was a piece of social criticism, of the rich and the spoiled and of the American family, really.”

“A director in Hollywood in my time couldn’t do what he wanted to do.”

“Paul Kohner, my agent, persuaded me to sign a contract with Columbia - this must have been about mid-1942.  I got about 150 dollars a week, which was nothing in Hollywood.  And this was a seven-year contract - they are the most impossible things in the whole world.”

“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.”

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

“With my last thousand dollars, I went and bought a small chicken farm in the San Fernando Valley.  I spent a year or more on this farm and in some ways, although I was completely broke, it was maybe my happiest time in America.  Then I sold it and bought an alfafa farm in Pomona County, where we also grew avocados, and had a few cows.  I thought my American movie career was probably over.”

“I’m not interested in failure in the sense given it by the neo-romantics who advocate the beauty of failure.  It is rather the kind of failure which invades you without rhyme or reason - not the kind of failure you can find in a writer like Hofmannsthal.  In both Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels, it is an ugly kind of failure, a completely hopeless one.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The word ‘melodrama’ has rather lost its meaning nowadays.  People tend to lose the ‘melos’ in it, the music.  I am not an American, indeed I come to this folklore of American melodrama from a world crazily removed from it.  But I was always fascinated with the kind of picture which is called a melodrama in America.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“I’ve always been interested in religion, even though I haven’t been to church in decades.  It is one of my constant preoccupations.  Even not believing in God is a religious act, in a way.”

“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.”

“But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world.  And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“If I couldn’t read, I couldn’t live.”

“Ross Hunter was my assistant on Take Me to Town, He was a young man, an actor before that, and learned a lot on the picture.  During shooting, Goldstein left, and Ross was most pleasant.  He never interfered.”

“The war was the end of an era, in art as well.  And we were trying to create a new philosophy.”

“You have to think with the heart.”

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

Douglas Sirk directed the following films:
Zwei Genies (1934)
Das Mädchen vom Moorhof (1935)
Der Eingebildete Kranke (1935)
Dreimal Ehe (1935)
April, April! (1935)
Stützen der Gesellschaft (1935)
La Chanson du souvenir (1936)
’t was een april (1936)
Schlußakkord (1936)
Das Hofkonzert (1936)
Zu neuen Ufern (1937)
La Habanera (1937)
Accord final (1938)
Boefje (1939)
Hitler’s Madman (1943)
Summer Storm (1944)
A Scandal in Paris (1946)
Lured (1947)
Sleep, My Love (1948)
Shockproof (1949)
Slightly French (1949)
Mystery Submarine (1950)
The First Legion (1951)
Thunder on the Hill (1951)
The Lady Pays Off (1951)
Week-End with Father (1951)
No Room for the Groom (1952)
Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952)
Meet Me at the Fair (1953)
Take Me to Town (1953)
All I Desire (1953)
Taza, Son of Cochise (1954)
Magnificent Obsession (1954)
Sign of the Pagan (1954)
Captain Lightfoot (1955)
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
There’s Always Tomorrow (1956)
Never Say Goodbye (1956)
Written on the Wind (1956)
Battle Hymn (1957)
Interlude (1957)
The Tarnished Angels (1958)
A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958)
Imitation of Life (1959)
Sprich zu mir wie der Regen (1976)
Silvesternacht – Ein Dialog (1978)
Bourbon Street Blues (1979)


Douglas Sirk contributed to the screenplay for the following films:
Das Hofkonzert (1936)
La Chanson du souvenir (1936)
Schlußakkord (1936)
Zu neuen Ufern (1937)
Summer Storm (1944)
Silvesternacht – Ein Dialog (1978)
Bourbon Street Blues (1979)