ERICH VON STROHEIM

"If you live in France and you have written one good book, or painted one good picture, or directed one outstanding film, 50 years ago, and nothing ever since, you are still recognized as an artist and honored accordingly . . . In Hollywood - in Hollywood, you're as good as your last picture. If you didn't have one in production in the last three months, you're forgotten, no matter what you have achieved ere this. It is that terrific, unfortunately necessary, egotism in the makeup of the people who make the cinema, it is the continuous endeavor for recognition, that continuous struggle for survival and supremacy, among the newcomers, that relegates the old-timers to the ashcan."

- Made in 1948 during his Eulogy broadcast for D. W. Griffith (it's interesting to note that the axiom "in Hollywood, you're as good as your last picture" is widely first attributed to comedienne and thespian Marie Dressler)

"The man who cut my picture has nothing on his head but a hat!"

- Made in 1924 after the final of many cuts made to his masterpiece Greed.

"It was like viewing a corpse in a graveyard."

- Made in 1924 after viewing the final studio cut version of Greed.

"I consider I have made only one real picture in my life and nobody ever saw that. The poor, mangled, mutilated remains were shown as Greed."

- Erich von Stroheim in the 1940s about Greed

"I was not going to compromise. I felt that after the last war, the motion picture going public had tired of the cinematographic 'chocolate eclairs' which had been stuffed down their throats, and which had in a large degree figuratively ruined their stomachs with this overdose of saccharose in pictures. Now, I felt, they were ready for a large bowl of plebeian but honest 'corned beef and cabbage.'...

...I felt that they had become weary of insipid Pollyanna stories with their peroxide-blonde, doll-like heroines, steeped in eternal virginity, and their hairless flat-chested sterile heroes, who were as lily-white as the heroines. I thought they could no longer bear to see the stock villains, dyed-in-the-wool, 100 per cent black, armed with moustache, mortgage and riding crop.

I believed audiences were ready to witness real drama and real tragedy, as it happens every day in every land; real love and real hatred of real men and women who were proud of their passions. I felt that the time was ripe to present screen stories about men and women who defied with written and unwritten codes, and who the consequence of their defiance gallantly, like many people do in real life. People who defied prejudice and jealousies, conventions and the social mores of a hypocritical society, who fought for their passions, conquered them or were conquered by them.

I knew that everything could be done with film, the only medium with which one could reproduce life as it actually was. I knew also that an entertainment that mirrored life would be more entertainment than one which distorted it. The sky was the limit! Whatever man could dream of, I could and would reproduce it in my films. I was going to metamorphose the 'movies' into an art -- a composite of all arts. Fight for it! and die for it, if need be!... Well, fight I did... And die... I almost did, too!"

- Erich von Stroheim on why he made Greed

"As soon as I had seen Fay Wray and spoken with her for a few minutes, I knew I had found the right girl."

- On casting Fay Wray in The Wedding March (and The Honeymoon)

"Fay has spirituality too, but she also has that very real sex appeal that takes hold of the hearts of men."

- Again talking about his casting of Fay Wray

"Since that first showing of Foolish Wives I have seemed to walk through vast crowds of people, their white American faces turned towards me in stern reproof."

- On the public reaction and perception of him after Foolish Wives

"Lubitsch shows you first the king on the throne, then as he is in the bedroom. I show you the king in the bedroom so you'll know just what he is when you see him on his throne."

- On his stylistic differences with Ernst Lubitsch

"This is not the worst. The worst is that they stole 25 years from my life . . ."

- To his biographer, on his deathbed in 1957