Directors Blasting Other Directors

Here’s a nice little get I found on Reddit, a user by the name of MortSahlfan posted highly entertaining quotes of famous directors hating on other famous directors.

Francois Truffaut on Michelangelo Antonioni:

“Antonioni is the only important director I have nothing good to say about. He bores me; he’s so solemn and humorless.”

Ingmar Bergman on Michelangelo Antonioni:

“Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own seriousness. He’s done two masterpieces, you don’t have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up (1966), which I’ve seen many times, and the other is La Notte (1961), also a wonderful film, although that’s mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection, have a copy of Il Grido (1957) and damn what a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He concentrated on single images, never realizing that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure, there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don’t feel anything for L’Avventura (1960), for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.”

Ingmar Berman on Orson Welles:

“For me, he’s just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of — is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that the movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable.”
“I’ve never liked Welles as an actor because he’s not really an actor. In Hollywood you have two categories, you talk about actors and personalities. Welles was an enormous personality, but when he plays Othello, everything goes down the drain, you see, that’s when he croaks. In my eyes, he’s an infinitely overrated filmmaker”

Ingmar Bergman on Jean-Luc Godard:
“I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual, and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He’s made his films for the critics. One of the movies,Masculin, Féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring.”

Orson Welles on Jean-Luc Godard:

“His gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker — and that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin.”

Werner Herzog on Jean-Luc Godard:

“Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung-fu film.”

Jean-Luc Godard on Quentin Tarantino:
“Tarantino named his production company after one of my films. He’d have done better to give me some money.”

Harmony Korine on Quentin Tarantino:
“Quentin Tarantino seems to be too concerned with other films. I mean, about appropriating other movies, like in a blender. I think it’s, like, really funny at the time I’m seeing it, but then, I don’t know, there’s a void there. Some of the references are flat, just pop culture.”

Nick Broomfield on Quentin Tarantino:
“It’s like watching a schoolboy’s fantasy of violence and sex, which normally Quentin Tarantino would be wanking alone to in his bedroom while this mother is making his baked beans downstairs. Only this time he’s got Harvey Weinstein behind him and it’s on at a million screens.”

Clint Eastwood on Spike Lee:
“A guy like him should shut his face.”

Jacques Rivette on Stanley Kubrick:
“Kubrick is a machine, a mutant, a Martian. He has no human feeling whatsoever. But it’s great when the machine films other machines, like in2001.”

Jacques Rivette on James Cameron (and Steven Spielberg):
“Cameron isn’t evil, he’s not an asshole like Spielberg. He wants to be the new De Mille. Unfortunately, he can’t direct his way out of a paper bag. “

Jean-Luc Godard on Steven Spielberg:
“I don’t know him personally. I don’t think his films are very good.”

Alex Cox on Steven Spielberg:
“Spielberg isn’t a filmmaker, he’s a confectioner.”

Tim Burton on Kevin Smith:
“Anyone who knows me knows I would never read a comic book. And I would especially never read anything created by Kevin Smith.”

Kevin Smith on Paul Thomas Anderson (specifically, Magnolia):
“I’ll never watch it again, but I will keep it. I’ll keep it right on my desk, as a constant reminder that a bloated sense of self-importance is the most unattractive quality in a person or their work.”

David Gordon Green on Kevin Smith:
“He kind of created a Special Olympics for film. They just kind of lowered the standard. I’m sure their parents are proud; it’s just nothing I care to buy a ticket for.”

Vincent Gallo on Spike Jonze:
“He’s the biggest fraud out there. If you bring him to a party he’s the least interesting person at the party, he’s the person who doesn’t know anything. He’s the person who doesn’t say anything funny, interesting, intelligent… He’s a pig piece of shit.”

Vincent Gallo on Martin Scorsese:
“I wouldn’t work for Martin Scorsese for $10 million. He hasn’t made a good film in 25 years. I would never work with an egomaniac has-been.”

Vincent Gallo on Sofia (and Francis Ford) Coppola:
“Sofia Coppola likes any guy who has what she wants. If she wants to be a photographer she’ll fuck a photographer. If she wants to be a filmmaker, she’ll fuck a filmmaker. She’s a parasite just like her fat, pig father was.”

David Cronenberg on M. Night Shymalan:
“I HATE that guy! Next question.”

Alan Parker on Peter Greenaway (specifically “The Draughtsman’s Contact”):
“A load of posturing poo-poo.”

Uwe Boll on Michael Bay:
“I’m not a fucking retard like Michael Bay.”

Luchino Visconti on Luis Bunuel:

“I think today there are too many directors taking themselves seriously; the only one capable of saying anything really new and interesting is Luis Bunuel. He’s a very great director.”

Luchino Visconti on Michelangelo Antonioni":

“It seems that boredom is one of the great discoveries of our time. If so, there’s no question but that he must be considered a pioneer.”

Spike Lee on Tyler Perry: 

“We got a black president, and we going back to Mantan Moreland and Sleep ‘n’ Eat?”

Tyler Perry on Spike Lee:

“Spike can go straight to hell! You can print that… Spike needs to shut the hell up!”

Andrei Tarkovsky:

“There are few people of genius in the cinema; look at Bresson, Mizoguchi, Dovzhenko, Paradjanov, Bunuel: not one of them could be confused with anyone else. An artist of that calibre follows one straight line, albeit at great cost; not without weakness or even, indeed, occasionally being farfetched; but always in the name of the one idea, the one conception.”

“What is Bresson’s genre? He doesn’t have one. Bresson is Bresson. He is a genre in himself. Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, Dovzhenko, Vigo, Mizoguchi, Bunuel – each is identified with himself. The very concept of genre is as cold as the tomb. And is Chaplin – comedy? No: he is Chaplin, pure and simple; a unique phenomenon, never to be repeated.”

“There are two basic categories of film directors. One consists of those who seek to imitate the world in which they live, the other of those who seek to create their own world. The second category contains the poets of cinema, Bresson, Dovzenko, Mizoguchi, Bergman, Buñuel and Kurosawa, the cinema’s most important names. The work of these film-makers is difficult to distribute: it reflects their inner aspirations, and this always runs counter to public taste. This does not mean that the film-makers don’t want to be understood by their audience. But rather that they themselves try to pick up on and understand the inner feelings of the audience.”